Historical research is playing an increasingly important role in marine sciences. Historical data are also used in policy making and marine resource management, and have helped to address the issue of shifting baselines for numerous species and ecosystems. Although many important research questions still remain unanswered, tremendous developments in conceptual and methodological approaches are expected to contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the global history of human interactions with life in the seas. Based on our experiences and knowledge from the “History of Marine Animal Populations” project, this paper identifies the emerging research topics for future historical marine research. It elaborates on concepts and tools which are expected to play a major role in answering these questions, and identifies geographical regions which deserve future attention from marine environmental historians and historical ecologists.

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This paper assesses the potentials of the available time series (50 years+) from historical records of the preindustrial period until c. 1850-1950. A number of historical records from commercially important fish species are available for examining natural variability of fish stocks. Especially for North Atlantic and Japanese fisheries historical data have been retrieved from archives and museums, which cover time spans of 50-350 years. This makes it possible to examine natural variability of fish stocks over a much longer time span than what is normally possible with modern survey data and commercial catch data. Furthermore, historical evidence from the pre-industrialized period have the benefit of stemming from a period in time, when fishing had an insignificant impact on the abundance of open sea fish stocks. The best material comes from cod and herring fisheries, where it is possible to reconstruct CPUE as accurate as catch per boat per day absent, as well as changing spatial distribution over longer time periods.

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