ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2019
Using historical and palaeoecological data to inform ambitious species recovery targets.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Joining forces toward proactive elephant and rhinoceros conservation.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2022Pooled it
- Cenozoic losses of tree diversity constrain climatic adaptation of Western and Central European forests.Nature communications · 2026Article
- A global indicator of species recovery.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2025Article
- New Perspectives on European Wildcat (Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- The effect of habitat loss and fragmentation on isolation by distance and divergence.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Systematic conservation planning for nature recovery.Bioscience · 2025Article
- Environmental suitability throughout the late quaternary explains population genetic diversity.Ecography · 2025Article
- A 19th Century Stormwrecked Black-Capped Petrel From Vermont Offers Insight Into Historical Vagrancy Processes.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Impact of historical land use change on the brown bear habitat connectivity in the Polish Carpathians.PeerJ · 2025Article
- Detecting Range Shrinking From Historical Amphibian Species Occurrences Under Influence of Human Impacts: A Case Study Using the Chinese Giant Salamander,Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- The potential of historical spy-satellite imagery to support research in ecology and conservation.Bioscience · 2024Review
- Threatened North African seagrass meadows have supported green turtle populations for millennia.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Quantifying the impacts of 166 years of land cover change on lowland bird communities.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Article
- Unshifting the baseline: a framework for documenting historical population changes and assessing long-term anthropogenic impacts.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Insights from the past: unique opportunity or foreign country?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Historical data are a valuable resource for addressing present-day conservation issues, for example by informing the establishment of appropriate recovery targets. However, while the recovery of threatened species is the end goal of many conservation programmes, data made available through the efforts of palaeoecologists and historical ecologists are rarely consulted. The proposal of a 'Green List of Species' by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) will soon change this. The Green List of Species measures recovery against historical baselines; in particular, the method requires estimates of species range and abundance in previous centuries. In this paper, we present the case for why setting species recovery against a historical baseline is necessary to produce ambitious conservation targets, and we highlight examples from palaeoecology and historical ecology where fossil and archival data have been used to establish historical species baselines. Finally, we introduce Conservation Archive (https://conservationarchive.shinyapps.io/ConservationArchive/), a database of resources that can be used to infer baseline species conditions, and invite contributions to this database. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The past is a foreign country: how much can the fossil record actually inform conservation?'
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