Paolo Abondio1*, Jonathan D. Cybulski2*, Julia De Entrambasaguas-Laguna3*, Erin Dillon4*, Niklas Hohmann5*, Yuanyuan Hong6*, Matias Ritter7*, Isaiah Smith8*

1Dept. Cultural Heritage, University of Bologna, Italy. Email: paolo.abondio2@unibo.it

2Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama City, Panama. Graduate School of Oceanography, The University of Rhode Island, USA. Email: cybulskij@si.edu

3Department of Earth Sciences, University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain. Email: jdeentrambasaguas@unizar.es

4Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama City, Panama. Email: dillone@si.edu

5Utrecht University, Department of Earth Sciences, Utrecht, The Netherlands; University of Warsaw, Faculty of Biology, Biological and Chemical Research Centre, Institute of Evolutionary Biology, Warsaw, Poland. Email: N.Hohmann@uw.edu.pl

6School of Biological Sciences, Swire Institute of Marine Science, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR. Email: oocirclr@gmail.com

7Centro de Estudos Costeiros, Limnológicos e Marinhos, UFRGS Litoral, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Email: matias.ritter@ufrgs.br

8GeoZentrum Nordbayern, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Loewenichstr, Erlangen, Germany. Email: isaiah.e.smith@fau.de

*Equal contributions

ABSTRACT:

The global climate and biosphere are rapidly changing, with grave consequences for humans and nature. While humans have affected the environment for millennia, systematic surveys of human impacts have only been conducted over the last few decades. This limits our ability to establish baselines and contextualize recent change because many recent observations are based on ecosystems that are already outside their range of natural variation. Therefore, to fully understand the adaptive capabilities and long-term resilience of stressor-exposed ecosystems, we must seek answers in the past.

Conservation paleobiology is an emerging field that applies methods and data from diverse disciplines, such as ecology, paleontology, geology, and conservation biology. By using the fossil record, conservation paleobiology provides insights into ecosystem dynamics and biotic responses to major environmental perturbations over millennia to millions of years. It enables the reconstruction of past ranges of natural variability as well as the evaluation of drivers and trajectories of long-term ecosystem change, with the purpose of guiding ecosystem conservation, restoration, and management.

We invite contributions from both researchers and practitioners on topics pertaining to paleontology and related fields, including (but not limited to) archaeology, anthropology, conservation, restoration ecology, wildlife management, and historical ecology. We encourage both near-time and deep-time perspectives on ecological and evolutionary processes during periods of environmental change (natural and anthropogenic) and potential biases affecting the fossil record. In addition, we welcome submissions on data-driven conservation efforts and collaborations with conservation practitioners.

We hope to gather exciting and thought-provoking contributions that will stimulate discussions among scientific disciplines, practitioners, stakeholders, and policy-makers around the most urgent questions in conservation paleobiology.

This session is supported by the Conservation Paleobiology Network (https://conservationpaleorcn.org/)

CONTRIBUTIONS:

Coming soon!