The Past as a Lens for Biodiversity Conservation on a Dynamically Changing Planet

Abstract

Both climate and land-use change have accelerated over the past decades. The cumulative effects of these disruptions are not additive or systematic, rather they pose complex, dynamic environmental challenges to ecological systems. To survive, terrestrial plants and animals will need to shift their distributions to track habitable regions or exhibit the flexibility to survive these shifting environmental regimes. As biota dramatically shift their ranges, ecological communities across Earth’s natural landscapes will restructure. We must formulate effective, long-term dynamic conservation approaches to accommodate migration, adaptation, and acclimation in response to rapid change. However, given the dynamic nature of today’s changes, it can be challenging to identify the most effective strategies that allow ecosystems to bounce forward. I will present research from a new special feature that argues the importance of taking a deeper-time perspective to large-scale solutions to the modern biodiversity crisis. Conservation practitioners highlight the ecological theory and hypotheses that should be examined to effectively translate historical findings into actionable conservation practices. Ecologists and paleoecologists, working across temporal scales, demonstrating approaches that have already begun to effectively inform the conservation of biodiversity on a dynamically changing planet. Studies identify resilient and connected landscapes, explore ecological movement dynamics, and evaluate how extinctions and range-shifting species lead to the erosion of functional groups that affect trait-environment dynamics through space and time. I will highlight research that addresses some of the main challenges for performing conservation paleontology at large spatial scales: 1) knowledge coproduction; 2) hypothesis development and testing using long-term historical data; 3) reporting of effect sizes for direct applications; and 4) integration into applied products.