Biology in the Anthropocene: Challenges and insights from young fossil records

Abstract

With overwhelming evidence of change in habitats, biologists today must assume that few, if any, study areas are natural and that biological variability is superimposed on trends rather than stationary means. Paleobiological data from the youngest sedimentary record, including death assemblages actively accumulating on modern land surfaces and seabeds, provide unique information on the status of present-day species, communities, and biomes over the last few decades to millennia and on their responses to natural and anthropogenic environmental change. Key advances have established the accuracy and resolving power of paleobiological information derived from naturally preserved remains and of proxy evidence for environmental conditions and sample age so that fossil data can both implicate and exonerate human stressors as the drivers of biotic change and permit the effects of multiple stressors to be disentangled. Legacy effects from Industrial and even pre-Industrial anthropogenic extirpations, introductions, (de)nutrification, and habitat conversion commonly emerge as the primary factors underlying the present-day status of populations and communities; within the last 2 million years, climate change has rarely been sufficient to drive major extinction pulses absent other human pressures, which are now manifold. Young fossil records also provide rigorous access to the baseline composition and dynamics of modern-day biota under pre-Industrial conditions, where insights include the millennial-scale persistence of community structures, the dominant role of physical environmental conditions rather than biotic interactions in determining community composition and disassembly, and the existence of naturally alternating states.biodiversity | ecology | conservation | paleobiology | paleoecology

The Role of Paleoecology in Restoration and Resource Management—The Past As a Guide to Future Decision-Making: Review and Example from the Greater Everglades Ecosystem, U.S.A

“…The concept of a baseline and the application of these ideas have been debated (Millar and Woolfenden, 1999;Froyd and Willis, 2008;Jackson and Hobbs, 2009;Dietl and Flessa, 2011;Watson et al, 2011;Kidwell, 2015), but the majority of scientists and resource managers do not view a baseline as the goal for restoration of an ecosystem to a former condition. They recognize, as NPS has, that ecosystems are dynamic and that a baseline is a snapshot in time that represents a valuable, but arbitrary, starting point for understanding ecosystem changes over time.…”

“…In Europe, the Water Framework Directive specifically focuses on restoring all surface waters of the EU to "good" ecological and chemical status by 2015(European Commission, 2015. The urgency of these efforts is highlighted by the United Nations Environmental Program estimate that close to a third of the world's ecosystems have been transformed or destroyed and another third have been significantly disrupted (Nellemann and Corcoran, 2010).…”

“…Diurnal, lunar, seasonal, annual, and to some extent decadal scale changes can be directly observed, measured, and/or monitored by scientists; however, to investigate change that occurs over decadal to millennial scales, paleoecologic, and geologic records must be used to extend the period of record past directly recorded data. For these reasons, scientists have advocated the use of paleoecologic and geologic data to provide the long-term perspective on community and ecosystem responses to change (for example, Binford et al, 1983;Davis, 1989;Anderson, 1993;Cohen, 1995;Orson, 1996;Parsons et al, 1999;Swetnam et al, 1999;Aronson and Precht, 2001;Jackson, 2001Jackson, , 2007Jackson et al, 2001;Kowalewski, 2001;Alin and Cohen, 2004;Weckström et al, 2004;NRC, 2005;Bottjer, 2006;Froyd and Willis, 2008;Jackson and Hobbs, 2009;Davies and Bunting, 2010;Gell, 2010;Watson et al, 2011;Seddon et al, 2014;Van Riper et al, 2014;Kidwell, 2015;Pellatt et al, 2015).…”

Petrifying Earth Process: The Stratigraphic Imprint of Key Earth System Parameters in the Anthropocene

“…(Mora et al 2011) and inherent biases involved in fossilization towards hard-shelled or otherwise skeletonized marine organisms. Nevertheless, at least within certain categories, comparisons may sensibly be made (Kidwell 2015), and the kind of large-scale syntheses made by Barnosky et al (2011Barnosky et al ( , 2014; see also Ceballos et al 2015, Pimm et al 2014) suggest considerable elevation of extinction rates that, with current trajectories suggest a geologically imminent (2-3 centuries) mass extinction event on a par with the 'Big Five' extinction events of the Phanerozoic Eon. Currently, the geologically unprecedented level of species invasions is arguably producing a larger biostratigraphical signal than are extinctions per se, and both together are in effect redirecting the course of Earth's biological (and hence future palaeontological) evolution.…”

Putting fossils to work in hopes of restoration

“…Since then, however, the approach has been made much more powerful by three technical revolutions, says Kidwell, which she described in a 2015 PNAS paper (1). One revolution is the ability to reconstruct key parameters, like growth rates, diet, and community composition from the fossil record.…”