A new special issue entitled ‘The past is a foreign country: how much can the fossil record actually inform conservation?’ is published today in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Edited by Erin E. Saupe and Samuel T. Turvey, this special issue combines the perspectives of conservation biologists, Quaternary palaeontologists and deep-time palaeontologists to identify ways in which deep-time and near-time data can be used to inform conservation, discuss the barriers and limitations in the use of past data to inform conservation and practical ways in which past data can be, and are already being, fed into conservation policy and management. Invited to participate in that issue along with other collaborators, we contributed with three papers, arising from very different projects: - Anthropocene refugia: integrating history and predictive modelling to assess the space available for biodiversity in a human-dominated world. S. Monsarrat, S. Jarvie, J-C Svenning http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0219 In this opinion paper, we introduce the Anthropocene refugia concept, which identifies areas that will remain climatically suitable for a given species in the long-term while providing spatial and temporal protection from human activities. It intersects knowledge on species’ potential distribution, incorporating prehistoric and historic data, with spatial information on current and future human activities. Identifying Anthropocene refugia could become an integral component of the conservation and restoration toolbox by allowing better prediction of key areas to protect biodiversity in the Anthropocene This work is a contribution to the MegaPast2Future project, hosted by BIOCHANGE - Center for Biodiversity Dynamics in a Changing World and Ecoinf - Section for Ecoinformatics and Biodiversity, at Aarhus University, Denmark. - Shifted distribution baselines: neglecting long-term biodiversity records risks overlooking potentially suitable habitat for conservation management. S. Monsarrat, P. Novellie, I. Rushworth, G. Kerley http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0215 We compared outputs of species distribution models and niche hypervolumes built using recent records only with those built using both recent and long-term (post-1500) records, for a set of 34 large mammal species in South Africa. We find that, while using recent records only is adequate for some species, adding historical records in the analyses impacts estimates of the niche and habitat suitability for fourteen species (41%) in our dataset, and that this effect is significantly higher for carnivores. These results show that neglecting long-term biodiversity records in spatial analyses risks misunderstanding, and generally underestimating, species’ niche, which in turn may lead to ill-informed management decisions This work was conducted during my postdoc at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa and was funded by a Claude Leon Postdoctoral fellowship. - Unshifting the baseline: a framework for documenting historical population changes and assessing long-term anthropogenic impacts. A.S.L. Rodrigues, S. Monsarrat, A. Charpentier, T.M. Brooks, M. Hoffmann, R.R. Reeves, M.L.D. Palomares and S.T. Turvey Led by my PhD supervisor, Ana Rodrigues, this paper presents a new framework to documenting long-term, cumulative, anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity, by classifying populations according to the extent to which they deviate from a baseline in the absence of human actions. Through examples, we discuss how the framework can be applied to populations for which there is a wide diversity of existing knowledge, by making the best use of the available ecological, historical, and archaeological data. Combined across multiple populations, this framework provides a standard for assessing cumulative anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity. To quote the editors of that issue: "We are convinced that the past, although a foreign country, has a vitally important role to play for informing the present and helping to predict the future in the fight to maintain global biodiversity. We hope that this volume will serve as a guide and framework to facilitate future discussion and an improved use of past data in conservation." REFERENCES Monsarrat S., Jarvie S., Svenning J-C. (2019) Anthropocene refugia: integrating history and predictive modelling to assess the space available for biodiversity in a human-dominated world. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (doi: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0219) Monsarrat S., Novellie P., Rushworth I., Kerley G.I.H. (2019) Shifted distribution baselines: neglecting long-term biodiversity records risks overlooking potentially suitable habitat for conservation management. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. (doi: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0215) Rodrigues A.S.L., Monsarrat S., Charpentier A., Brooks T., Hoffmann, M., Reeves, R.R., Palomares M.L.D., Turvey, S.T. (2019) Unshifting the baseline: a framework for documenting historical population changes and assessing long-term anthropogenic impacts. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (doi: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0220)
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