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The appropriate role of historical information in ecosystem restoration is a topic of debate within restoration ecology, as the discipline and the practice of restoration adapt to keep up with the increasing demands and challenges of multiple human impacts and global climate change. Whereas historical data have traditionally been used to define restoration baselines and criteria for success, current practice emphasizes a less prescriptive and more process-based interpretation of historical data. In addition to these traditional applications, in this chapter, Keryn Gedan, Denise L Breitburg, Robin Grossinger, and Torben C. Rick describe the broader use of historical information to describe landscape processes and linkages and understand ecosystem trajectories and controls by examining historical responses of ecosystems to human impacts, disturbances, and climate changes. Historical ecology can also inform restoration sustainability and the identification of novel ecosystems. Despite the challenges of restoring ecosystems within larger, often highly modified landscapes and the need to manage ecosystems to be resilient to global environmental change, ecosystem restorations make sense only in the light of history.

Historical perspectives are relevant to marine conservation, yet rarely integrated into planning efforts. Marine conservation planning is concerned with measures that should be taken in the future. It usually focuses on mitigating anticipated adverse changes caused by current and future human activities, with the assumption that present conditions should be maintained. In this chapter, Natalie C. Ban, John N. Kittinger, John Pandolfi, Robert L. Pressey, Ruth Thurstan, Matthew J. Lybolt, and Simon Hart show that without incorporating historical data and analysis, such approaches, in the best case, will cause us to aim too low and, in the worst case, can result in inappropriate targets for planning and management. We review the role that historical perspectives can provide in marine conservation planning, highlight planning exercises in which this has occurred or has been discussed, and provide recommendations for researchers and planners. Using the systematic conservation-planning framework, we show that each planning stage benefits from a historical perspective, and we illustrate that failure to consider historical information reduces the effectiveness of marine conservation planning. We posit that historical perspectives may shift the conservation focus from restoring previous ecosystem states to recovering critical ecosystem functions that maintain resilience. Historical perspectives can change the conservation vision for a region, providing a window onto possibilities for the future.

When reconstructing long-term changes in marine ecosystems and populations of marine animals, historical data are needed to encompass the natural scale of population dynamics, disentangle short-term variability from longer fluctuations, and describe events that occurred decades or centuries ago. Historical data, however, are often difficult to obtain, vary greatly in format and quality, and were less consistently collected than most modern quantitative data. Concern for incorrectly integrating such different sources of information across long time periods means that many historical datasets are used only in part—or not at all. However, for many locations, such datasets provide the only sources of information on changes to populations or ecosystems. In this chapter, Francesco Ferretti, Larry B. Crowder, and Fiorenza Micheli review methods for accessing and incorporating disparate forms of historical data into quantitative historical reconstructions for marine species. We show how reconstructing historical baselines and documenting long-term changes can provide a powerful means to engage the public and motivate and inform policy reform. We illustrate this approach by highlighting Mediterranean fisheries and historical analyses of sharks and rays, a region and species group characterized by long histories of exploitation.

The introduction outlines the three modes of geographic history analysis utilized in the book: making, landscape, and historical ecology. Making examines the various creative and haptic skills, using inherent or acquired knowledge, that are involved in the process of producing structures and machines that perform functions or tasks. Landscape is both a physical entity and a register of contemporary and historical knowledge; it is both the physical and built environment and a way of knowing the world. Distilling landscapes are shaped by complex natural processes and cultural practices, as well as by contemporary and historical actors, that layer or juxtapose the new and the old. Landscape elements, such as structures or various forms of land use, may be removed; but if retained, they represent heritage and become a reservoir of meaning and identity. Historical ecology is the investigation of the physical and human elements that constitute present-day landscapes through the conjunctions of people, places, and processes over time, with attention to order, timing, and contingency of causal events. Understanding the historical ecology of landscape requires an appreciation of its totality through local, regional, and national perspectives.

Marine historical ecology powerfully frames ocean issues. It reveals rich new storylines and opportunities for new constituencies in the public to identify with a specific place or time in history. Historical anecdote, personal experience, and imagery, which are less polarizing than some conservation messages, can create interest among people who may not naturally care about fish, the sea, or the health of the marine environment. In this chapter, using the concept of framing, Catherine Marzin, Sian Evans, and Karen Alexander describe mechanisms to engage the public via old and new media. Exciting the imagination on an individual level, marine historical ecology can create a sense of ownership and recognition of the need for ocean stewardship. New outreach strategies can be developed, utilizing all the tools of new media including discoverability, social participation, and mobility. Historians and scientists can harness the power of history and scientific observation in new arcs of storytelling across new media platforms—social, textual, and visual.

Why do we need marine historical ecology and conservation? The fact is that since Darwin's On the Origin of Species, we have become quite good at inferring what existed—in terms of animals and plants—if only because we have (a) fossils and (b) a powerful theory which allows, nay demands, that we interpolate between the forms we know existed, because we have fossils, and the forms for which we have no direct evidence but which we can link to present forms, including us humans. The Earth's ecosystems have all been modified by human activities, and this applies also to essentially all marine ecosystems, which whaling and hunting of other marine mammals, and later fishing, have reduced to shadows of their former selves in terms of the larger organisms they now support and the benefits they can provide us. Some of these ecosystem modifications were unavoidable, but to a large extent, the depredations that we have imposed on the oceans have been entirely gratuitous. It is perfectly reasonable to ask ourselves how we could prevent such catastrophes in the future and whether we can rebuild now depleted populations of marine organisms so as to reduce the risk of this occurring again, and to have more to enjoy. This is what marine historical ecology in conservation is for: to inform us about what these populations have been in the past, and under which conditions these populations could flourish so that we can start helping them do so.

Over the past centuries and decades, high exploitation pressure has led to strong declines in a wide range of marine mammal, bird, reptile, and fish populations. Today, many species are at low abundance levels, endangered, or extinct on a regional or global scale. Yet throughout history, people have responded to declining resource abundance by implementing management and conservation measures. Sometimes these measures were successful and resulted in recovery; other times, they failed. Such successes and failures can serve as guides for conservation and management efforts aiming at preventing further biodiversity loss and restoring functioning ecosystems. This chapter, by Heike Lotze, highlights the role of marine historical ecology in assessing the magnitude and success of recovery by analyzing long-term population trends. It presents an overview of trajectories of recovery and non-recovery across a range of species and taxonomic groups, and it discusses the major drivers enabling recovery. It also assesses how common recovery is among depleted populations and what the timeline and magnitude of recoveries have been. Finally, it evaluates how knowledge from marine historical ecology can be applied to improve current management strategies and future conservation planning to foster further recoveries in marine ecosystems.

Restoration is undertaken not only to reverse habitat losses but also to recover the many valuable ecosystem services associated with coastal habitats. While ecosystem services are increasingly being used to define restoration objectives for a number of marine and terrestrial habitats, historical estimates of ecosystem service delivery are rare, in part due to the difficulty of making such estimates. However, by combining historical data with an understanding of the habitat characteristics (e.g., density or habitat complexity) and environmental conditions (e.g., salinity, location relative to other habitats) that influence service provision, historical estimates of ecosystem services can be used to target restoration efforts and management practices toward the desired outcomes. Oyster reefs have suffered an estimated 85 percent decline globally over the past 150 years, and there are growing efforts to restore oyster reefs at a large scale to recover oyster fishery, fish production, water quality, and other ecosystem services. In this chapter, Philine zu Ermgassen, Mark D. Spalding, and Robert D. Brumbaugh explore the estimation of historical provision of ecosystem services in oyster reefs as a case study to understand the ecological and socially relevant reference points that these estimates provide for restoration goals.

This chapter advances historical ecology as one of a number of approaches to new studies of the first millennium BC. It provides guidelines on how a research team might organize a historical ecological project (in this case, a study of Atlantic Europe during the first millennium BC).

This summary takes a retrospective view of the preceding substantive and analytical chapters. These chapters bespeak new and significant findings relevant to the research program of historical ecology. They treat specifically the biotic and historical consequences of the interactions between foragers and landscapes and between foragers and seascapes. Most of the book deals with archaeological time periods, but evidence from the more recent past in an ethnohistorical context is also presented. Deep time is rendered accessible in this volume thanks to advances in archaeological methods and procedures, as well as an increasingly sophisticated—and nuanced—view of the environment and the activities of foraging societies within it.

In this chapter, Jon M. Erlandson, Todd J. Braje, Robert L. DeLong, and Torben C. Rick examine the process of novel community reassembly following historical overharvest, through an examination of the historical ecology of pinnipeds along North America's Pacific Coast. We compare changes in the biogeography of ancient versus modern pinniped populations, and we discuss the implications for the use of archaeological records in conservation biology and environmental management. Driven to the brink of extinction by commercial hunting in historic times, several Pacific Coast pinniped species have recovered dramatically under federal and state protection. Pacific Coast archaeological records show that humans hunted pinnipeds for at least the past twelve thousand years, for instance, and that the ancient distribution and abundance of northern elephant seals and Guadalupe fur seals differed significantly from today. Knowledge of such long-term anthropogenic changes, along with a dearth of data about the “natural” state of Pacific Coast pinniped populations, raises interesting questions about the nature and sustainability of conservation efforts.

Marine historical ecologists frequently cite the need for better storytelling to make their research meaningful to society at large. In this chapter, James B. MacKinnon provides a review of literature from this discipline, which points to a promising area of narrative focus. The view of nature as a relatively fixed commodity predominates in public discourse. A historical perspective, however, suggests that the natural world that surrounds us can be seen in large part as a product of choice, with the tragic decline of the marine environment the result of choices made without the benefit of social memory. This understanding places a high value on historical context and offers a forward-looking alternative to familiar narratives of past and present guilt and greed. Most importantly, it affirms that the debate over marine conservation is fundamentally about individual and collective values, in which everyone has a stake.

Overfishing, pollution, climate change, mismanagement, and other factors have resulted in severely depleted marine ecosystems and anthropogenic seascapes. Steps have been taken to reverse trends, mitigate damage, and restore degraded fisheries and marine ecosystems to a more “natural” balance. This book has demonstrated, based on archaeological and historical data, that hunting and scavenging have affected pinnipeds and sea otters over long time periods. This chapter revisits the issues associated with the archaeology and historical ecology of pinnipeds and sea otters in the northeastern Pacific Coast. It examines how ancient peoples from southern California to Alaska influenced and impacted ancient pinniped and sea otter abundance, biogeography, and behavior. It also discusses the effects of ancient climate changes on pinnipeds, sea otters, and human society, and how the effects of human impacts can be distinguished from natural climatic changes.

California's Channel Islands currently shelter more than 200,000 pinnipeds of six different species, and more than a dozen large and small cetacean species also swim through or are seasonally resident in island waters. This chapter explores the archaeology and historical ecology of California Channel Island marine mammals and analyzes the available historical and archaeological evidence for marine mammal hunting in the area. It also draws on archaeological, historical, and ecological data to examine the resilience and reorganization of marine mammal populations on Channel Islands over the past 12,000 years. It summarizes key aspects of the natural history of those North Pacific marine mammals that reside in or visit southern California waters today and were the target of ancient Native hunters and scavengers in the past. After a brief summary of modern marine mammal behavior, natural history, and distribution in the Santa Barbara Bight, the chapter synthesizes the archaeological record of island marine mammal hunting.

The health of fisheries is difficult to assess, because catches are only partially recorded and abundance cannot be directly observed. Understanding the status of fisheries requires an estimate of what they are capable of producing in the absence of fishing, yet data rarely extends back to pre-exploitation states. Without catch and abundance estimates across a range of fish densities, it is difficult to estimate the capacity of a fishery. Historical data (historical, archaeological, and geological records; ecological reconstructions; local and traditional ecological knowledge) provide that information. These data can help managers avoid “shifting baseline syndrome,” in which stock-rebuilding programs are influenced by the most recent peak in productivity. Such approaches can also help small fisheries, where standard assessments and assumptions aren't applicable and where historically based analyses can provide scientific advice to guide management. This chapter, by Alan M. Friedlander, Joshua Sladek Nowlis, and Haruko Koike, shows how historical data can inform fishery assessment, using case studies from small tropical fisheries, which present complex challenges due to the number of species exploited, the variety of gear employed, and the diffuse nature of fishing locations and landing sites. Communities worldwide are combining historical data and local knowledge to manage fisheries. By incorporating these data, we bring insight into the past yield of these ecosystems and provide guidance for future management.