Conservation paleobiology has coalesced over the last two decades since its formal coining, united by the goal of applying geohistorical records to inform the conservation, management, and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Yet, the field is still attempting to form an identity distinct from its academic roots. Here, we ask a deceptively simple question: What is conservation paleobiology? To track its development as a field, we synthesize complementary perspectives from a survey of the scientific community that is familiar with conservation paleobiology and a systematic literature review of publications that use the term. We present an overview of conservation paleobiology’s research scope and compare survey participants’ perceptions of what it is and what it should be as a field. We find that conservation paleobiologists use a variety of geohistorical data in their work, although research is typified by near-time records of marine molluscs and terrestrial mammals collected over local to regional spatial scales. Our results also confirm the field’s broad disciplinary basis: survey participants indicated that conservation paleobiology can incorporate information from a wide range of disciplines spanning conservation biology, ecology, historical ecology, paleontology, and archaeology. Finally, we show that conservation paleobiologists have yet to reach a consensus on how applied the field should be in practice. The survey revealed that many participants thought the field should be more applied but that most do not currently engage with conservation practice. Reflecting on how conservation paleobiology has developed over the last two decades, we discuss opportunities to promote community cohesion, strengthen collaborations within conservation science, and align training priorities with the field’s identity as it continues to crystallize.
Documentation of the near- and long-term effects of the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill, one of the largest environmental disasters in US history, is still ongoing. We used a novel before-after-control-impact analysis to test the hypothesis that average body size of intertidal populations of the eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) inhabiting impacted areas in Louisiana decreased due to increased stress/mortality related to the oil spill. Time-averaged death assemblages of oysters were used to establish a pre-spill baseline of body-size structure for four impacted and four control locations along a 350 km stretch of Louisiana's coastline. Post-spill body sizes were then measured from live oysters at each site in order to evaluate the differences in body size between oiled (i.e. impact) and unoiled (i.e. control) locations before and after the spill. Our results indicate that average body size of oysters remained relatively unchanged after the oil spill. There were also no temporal patterns in temperature, salinity or disease prevalence that could have explained our results. Together, these findings suggest that oysters either recovered rapidly following the immediate impact of the DWH oil spill, or that its impact was not severe enough to influence short-term population dynamics of the oyster beds.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.