CHALLENGES OF CONSERVATION PALEOBIOLOGY: FROM BASELINES TO NOVEL COMMUNITIES TO THE NECESSITY FOR GRANTING RIGHTS TO NATURE

Abstract

Conservation Paleobiology (CP) was formally introduced more than 20 years ago (Flessa 2002) as a field that deals with the application of theories and analytical tools of paleontology to biodiversity conservation, but has multifaceted roots that go back at least into the 1970s (Dietl and Flessa 2009; Dillon et al. 2022). More than thirty years ago, it was already evident that anthropogenic impacts had changed modern marine environments so profoundly that ecological research alone does not catch undisturbed baselines (e.g., Pauly 1995; Jackson 1997; Jackson et al. 2001; Kowalewski 2001; Pandolfi et al. 2003; Stachowitsch 2003; Lotze et al. 2006). The volume “Conservation Paleobiology: Using the Past to Manage for the Future” published by The Paleontological Society (Dietl and Flessa 2009) and a seminal review (Dietl and Flessa 2011) outlined Conservation Paleobiology as an emerging field with high potential for new insights in conservation planning and management. Since then, several books and special issues with numerous case study articles have been published (Louys 2012; Tyler and Schneider 2018; Nawrot et al. 2023). This increasing publication record, together with a growing number of dedicated conference topical sessions and workshops (e.g., Turvey and Saupe 2019), and the creation of the Conservation Paleobiology Network (CPN, https:// conservationpaleorcn.org) establishes CP as a popular field at the interface of geological and life sciences. Conservation Paleobiology still has a relatively poor record of translating research into application, but this is also true for other scientific fields within Conservation Biology and could be improved by more active collaboration with conservation practitioners (Groff et al. 2023). However, establishing pre-impact baselines (i.e., reference conditions against which changes can be assessed) is one of the core competences of CP, which informs policymakers and society about potential goals to pursue species recovery and habitat restoration (Flessa 2017). Nevertheless, this unique feature of CP seems only of minor relevance to other conservationists (Kiessling et al. 2019), probably reflecting a psychological distance to paleontological timescales by the conservation biology community, because they are beyond personal experience (Dietl et al. 2019) and the many biological and social facets of conservation biology research. Importantly, a baseline is more than just an archive of a glorious or desirable past, it is a rich source of ecological information that uncovers how and why a community has changed over time and constrains potential scenarios of its future dynamics (Dietl 2019). This information about baselines based on the paleontological record is crucial and unique wherever long-term ecological data are missing. For example, the Eastern Mediterranean Sea is strongly affected by the Lessepsian invasion, and it was long considered that the tropical Indo-Pacific species entering the region though the Suez Canal had out-competed the native warm-temperate fauna (Edelist et al. 2012). No long-term ecological data were available to study the community change and its underlying ecological processes since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. However, death assemblages—the accumulation of skeletal parts in a landscape or seafloor and one of the sources of information CP practitioners can exploit—collected on the Israeli shelf demonstrate that native and nonindigenous assemblage components have differed in functional trait composition (i.e., they show different measurable properties of organisms, such as body size or feeding habit, which can be compared across species) since the onset of the invasion, suggesting that competition was unlikely the primary driver of the regional-scale native biodiversity loss (Steger et al. 2021). Our experience from this work, including the interaction with reviewers and editors, indicates that it is often very difficult to present the geohistorical record as an ecologically valuable source of baseline data to some ecologists because of a conceptual misunderstanding of the meaning and value of death assemblages. However, it is widely acknowledged that false perceptions of past environmental conditions, most notably the underestimation of the magnitude of environmental change (for example due to neglect of geohistorical data), may result in inappropriate conservation targets (Soga and Gaston 2018). In my opinion, baselines from death assemblages are therefore still grossly undervalued by the conservation biology community. But, as with any new product on the market, it apparently needs some time and good advertising before its value and the need for it is acknowledged. Nonetheless, it is certainly undisputed that the increasing human impact is forcing a change on most ecosystems and that a backward-looking effort alone to conserve, by preserving or re-establishing the past, is certain to fail (Sale 2021; see also Barnosky et al. 2017). In fact, rapid abiotic and biotic changes in marine environments, most notably global warming and species invasions, will lead to the evolution of novel ecosystems (e.g., Albano et al. 2021). Such ecosystems will have crossed thresholds that make the restoration of historical baselines unachievable (Hobbs et al. 2009). In this essay I focus on shallow-marine ecosystems by looking back in time to emphasize the important aspects of establishing reliable baselines, and by looking ahead to highlight the role of CP in managing novel communities. I also wish to emphasize the importance of granting rights to ecosystems and nature in general—in my opinion this should be a primary agenda for the whole conservation community.