Geohistorical records offer an invaluable source of long-term data to understand and predict ecosystem responses to climate and human driven changes. Understanding natural variations in fish and invertebrate populations in decadal, centennial and millennial timescales, and quantifying the impacts of anthropogenic activities on marine ecosystems requires collaborative research across traditional disciplinary boundaries.
In the past decade, there have been important advances in this field and there are now many large-scale projects on quantifying human benefits from and impacts on Atlantic ecosystems, and the relative roles of climate change and human activities in decadal, centennial and millennial timescales. However, a strategic scientific agenda interconnected with ICES priorities has not yet been developed. The aim of this session is to provide an overview of the research conducted using geohistorical records, to highlight the data and methodological gaps that should be addressed, and inform the ICES research strategy.
We invite presentations by scientists from a wide range of disciplines, including historical ecologists, environmental and climate historians, conservation paleobiologists, zooarchaeologists and ecosystem modellers, who are performing studies on:
- deep-time records as baselines of pristine marine life
- modeling approaches using geohistorical data
- extraction studies based on historical documents such as logbooks, landing records, and management reports
- methodological advances including ancient DNA, stable isotope analysis, geochemistry, sclerochronology, etc
- data derived from natural history collections and marine sediments
The session will highlight the potential of new methodologies for understanding
- the reliance and seasonality of past societies on marine resources, and
- the resilience of ecosystems to past human and climate disturbances
The aim of this session is to provide an overview of the research conducted using geohistorical records and to highlight the data and methodological gaps that should be addressed.
We expect the session to facilitate building new interdisciplinary collaborations, and to result in a report identifying temporal, scale and methodological gaps and approaches to address them. We will undertake to publish a special journal issue with the best papers of the session.
