Conference Agenda

Knowing past biodiversity distribution patterns is a key step to guide the conservation and management of natural resources. Yet, most indicators of biodiversity change designed to describe long-term and large-scale processes are based on relatively recent time-series, or space-for-time substitutions. Nonetheless, important historical information on biodiversity is often contained in a diverse and rich array of historical cultural sources (e.g. gazetteer, military maps) frequently ignored by environmental sciences, and within equally diverse natural archives (e.g. palynological records). Here, using the example of extensive data on biodiversity in the 16th and 19th centuries in Spain mobilized from geographical dictionaries, we will present the extent to which shifting the benchmark used to assess biodiversity change might affect our ability to detect this change and the resulting implications for decision making in conservation. We will discuss the implications of shifting the baseline for determining the conservation status of species, and the prioritization of certain areas for conservation. We will then discuss the overall potential of historical material for biodiversity conservation and address the identification, mobilization and integration of ecologically relevant historical data as well as pathways to further mine and share this information.

Without a sound understanding of the past, it is difficult to design sustainable solutions for the future. Remote sensing data are an important tool for assessing ecological change, but their value is often restricted by their limited temporal coverage. Many major historical events that still have lingering legacies in current environments are not captured by modern remote sensing data. Here, we demonstrate the considerable potential of historical spy satellite images to expand ecological and conservation assessments back to the 1960s. These data can answer important questions related to long-term ecological change, shifting baselines, lag effects, and ecological legacies. We highlight the potential of declassified, panchromatic satellite imagery, which has global terrestrial coverage, to monitor ecosystem extent and structure, species’ populations and habitats, as well as human pressures on the environment. Recent advances in image processing and analysis, combined with best practices in data sharing and archiving can now unlock this research resource. We encourage ecologists and conservationists to make use of this opportunity to address ecological and conservation questions, and we encourage the further release and open use of historical data archives for understanding long-term environmental change.

Knowing ecosystem states and species distribution patterns in past periods is crucial to understand the complex relationships between human societies and environmental change and guide biodiversity conservation. However, biodiversity researchers often consider that the trustable information needed to generate this knowledge is scarce. But people have in fact produced for centuries a huge amount of information on biodiversity, which is contained on a diverse array of historical sources that are frequently ignored by environmental sciences. Historical ecology approaches provide an adequate framework to integrate and synthesize historical information on species and ecosystems and inform biodiversity conservation planning.

Biodiversity records included in Iberian historical sources (back to the 1300s) are being mined, to provide useful information for biodiversity conservation. The resulting inventories are notable due the unprecedented combination of the fine grain and large extent (both in space and time), the taxonomic precision and diversity and the vast amount of data, with tens of thousands of localities providing hundreds of thousands of records. I will provide different examples of the application of historical information for biodiversity conservation, including species-focused conservation action in both freshwater and terrestrial systems, the management of biological invasions or the long-term reconstruction of landscape features.

Addressing the past patterns, dynamics and events is an ambitious but essential task to gain a thorough understanding of present-day biodiversity. Historical ecology is the emerging field of research which is rising to this challenge. Its markedly multidisciplinary nature is crucial in providing convincing answers to questions that would otherwise remain unsolved. We present here the paradigmatic case of the black francolin (Francolins francolinus), a prized gamebird presently ranging from Cyprus to India but historically also distributed along the European and African coasts of the Mediterranean. The combined use of museomics, archaeozoology, historical documentation - both textual and pictorial - allowed to ultimately assess the yet contentious nonnativeness of the black francolin to both Europe and Africa, while unveiling the extinct populations as originary from the Near East and the Indian subcontinent. If, on the one hand, the methodological advances of the last decades and archival DNA knowhow of molecular biologists were key, the information provided by historians about past diplomatic relationships, aesthetics and economics were equally important to confirm the trade of this gamebird along information long-distance trade routes. Remarkably, citizen science may play an important role in similar studies by helping to identify privately-owned and often neglected resources.

The blue humanities allows to combine multiple perspectives and methods to address historical trends of changes on ecosystems, sociocultural developments, impacts and the resulting consequences for marine populations. Within this dynamic field of research, we include both marine environmental history and historical marine ecology, and a series of species or populations can be analysed. The history of whales and whaling, that is the use of documentary, iconographic, cartographic sources and material evidence, to address past distributions, human practices and impacts on the ocean and its animals, is paramount to understand current environmental issues related to ocean conservation. Cultural products offer a sense of the importance of these animals to humans and the past and current state of interactions established. Analysing data from catches for Portugal since medieval times, and the former Portuguese colonial territories, we can draw a story of sequential use of targeted species of large whales. By exploring previously unknown natural history treatises, or other written sources alike, is now showing the scientific relevance of these animals for early modern society. Putting data together, we get an all-encompassing perspective on the historical, economic and cultural value of large whales up to the present day.

The most widely-used global metric of species conservation status today is the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, which assesses species’ extinction risk. The timescales over which changes in species status are evaluated must necessarily be relatively short (10 years or 3 generations, depending on the species) in order to highlight rapid declines in population size or range which may signal acute threats to species persistence. However, this narrow temporal focus presents a danger of shifting baselines, since declines which have occurred in previous centuries often do not fall within the relevant time window for assessment.

This talk focuses on IUCN’s response to the challenge of shifting baselines: The IUCN Green Status of Species. Launched in 2021, the Green Status of Species (a CBD indicator) is an assessment of species recovery, complementing the extinction risk assessment. Recovery is measured against a pre-impact baseline, often requiring historical sources of information. The Green Status promotes ambitions to restore species to historical levels, working in parallel with the crucial short-term focus on preventing extinction. This provides a more comprehensive conservation story that includes a species’ past, present, and potential future.