Filling historical data gaps to foster solutions in marine conservation
By Ruth H. Thurstan, Loren McClenachan, LB Crowder, J. Drew, John N. Kittinger, P. Levin, C. Roberts, J. Pandolfi. 2015
124 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Ecological data sets rarely extend back more than a few decades, limiting our understanding of environmental change and its drivers. Marine historical ecology has played a critical role in filling these data gaps by illuminating the magnitude and rate of ongoing changes in marine ecosystems. Yet despite a growing body of knowledge, historical insights are rarely explicitly incorporated in mainstream conservation and management efforts. Failing to consider historical change can have major implications for conservation, such as the ratcheting down of expectations of ecosystem quality over time, leading to less ambitious targets for recovery or restoration. We discuss several unconventional sources used by historical ecologists to fill data gaps - including menus, newspaper articles, cookbooks, museum collections, artwork, benthic sediment cores - and novel techniques for their analysis. We specify opportunities for the integration of historical data into conservation and management, and highlight the important role that these data can play in filling conservation data gaps and motivating conservation actions. As historical marine ecology research continues to grow as a multidisciplinary enterprise, great opportunities remain to foster direct linkages to conservation and improve the outlook for marine ecosystems.
Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/882489150f25387af22b5bd7e7d9db33d5e33c67
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In Ecology
In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Fish conservation in freshwater and marine realms: status, threats and management (2016, background): “…107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 oceans until recently, and the ‘shifting baseline’ psychology that means we are blind to changes prior to our human experience (Thurstan et al., 2015).”