Historical ecology: Using unconventional data sources to test for effects of global environmental change

Abstract

Predicting the future ecological impact of global change drivers requires understanding how these same drivers have acted in the past to produce the plant populations and communities we see today. Historical ecological data sources have made contributions of central importance to global change biology, but remain outside the toolkit of most ecologists. Here we review the strengths and weaknesses of four unconventional sources of historical ecological data: land survey records, "legacy" vegetation data, historical maps and photographs, and herbarium specimens. We discuss recent contributions made using these data sources to understanding the impacts of habitat disturbance and climate change on plant populations and communities, and the duration of extinction-colonization time lags in response to landscape change. Historical data frequently support inferences made using conventional ecological studies (e.g., increases in warm-adapted species as temperature rises), but there are cases when the addition of different data sources leads to different conclusions (e.g., temporal vegetation change not as predicted by chronosequence studies). The explicit combination of historical and contemporary data sources is an especially powerful approach for unraveling long-term consequences of multiple drivers of global change. Despite the limitations of historical data, which include spotty and potentially biased spatial and temporal coverage, they often represent the only means of characterizing ecological phenomena in the past and have proven indispensable for characterizing the nature, magnitude, and generality of global change impacts on plant populations and communities.

Global Island Monitoring Scheme (GIMS): a proposal for the long-term coordinated survey and monitoring of native island forest biota

“…Exceptions include the Kasuya Research forest (LTER-EAP-JP-07) and a small number of island forest plots within the CTFS-ForestGEO initiative (http://www.ctfs.si.edu/plots /summa ry; Anderson-Teixeira et al 2015). Only a few long-term projects quantify the impact of global change drivers of island ecosystems (but see Aggemyr and Cousins 2012;Vellend et al 2013). The Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments (GLORIA; Grabherr et al 2000) studies vegetation dynamics in high mountain systems.…”

Geospatial Informatics Key to Recovering and Sharing Historical Ecological Data for Modern Use

“…They also require continued focus on the development of data synthesis methods applied to disparate data from numerous sources and of varying quality (Goodchild et al, 2012). However, once digitized and shared, these historical collections can make key contributions in evaluating change and planning for the future (McClenachan et al, 2015;Vellend et al, 2013).…”

“…There are VTM data features in every county in California, and several areas have relatively high overlap (i.e., density) of VTM data types: for example the central Sierra Nevada forests in Alpine, Tuolumne, and Calaveras Counties, and the central coast woodlands in Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Ventura Counties (Figure 2e). The range of data types captured through the type specific process outlined above (maps, plots, specimens, photographs) represent a wide variety of workflows that cover a large range of common historical ecological data formats (Vellend et al, 2013).…”

Why vouchers matter in botanical research

“…Because of their historical relevance, vouchers represent a unique opportunity to obtain data on individuals from past time periods (Primack and Miller-Rushing, 2009; Vellend et al, 2013). For example, studies of impacts of climate change on plants have used herbarium specimens to show how temperature variation causes shifts in geographic distributions (Feeley, 2012) and flowering times (Primack et al, 2004; Lavoie and Lachance, 2006; Miller-Rushing et al, 2006; Robbirt et al, 2011; Panchen et al, 2012; Calinger et al, 2013).…”