Disentangling climate and pre-industrial human impacts on marine ecosystems (Q-MARE)

Project Description

Disentangling anthropogenic effects on ecosystems from the effects of natural fluctuations and climate-derived processes requires long timescale data on change from paleontological, paleoclimatic, archaeological, and historical archives. Integrating such data is a significant challenge, because they are very diverse (e.g. historical documents, oral histories, archaeological remains, fossils, geochemical proxies) and employ a broad range of terminologies, perspectives, approaches, and assumptions. One of the aims of Q-MARE is to provide guidelines for the integration and analysis of data from different disciplines (historical ecology, archaeology and conservation paleobiology) and timescales (daily to millennial). We believe that the current inability to smoothly combine data from these diverse sources is one of the obstacles to disentangling human and climate impacts.

The Q-MARE working group’s objectives are to review and synthesize data on climate and human impacts on marine ecosystems in the pre-industrial Holocene and Pleistocene with the aim of identifying knowledge gaps and promoting the value and use of pre-industrial data for the management of marine living resources. Together with our collaborators (see list below), we are currently in the process of assembling a database of pre-industrial Holocene and Pleistocene records so that we may pinpoint when humans began to have a significant impact on the marine environment.