ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2025
Ancient environmental DNA indicates limited human impact on marine biodiversity in pre-industrial Iceland.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Getting to the Core of the Matter-Assessing the Role of Replication in Metabarcoding-Based sedaDNA.Molecular ecology resources · 2026Article
- Shifting seas: understanding deep-time human impacts on marine ecosystems.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Ancient environmental DNA indicates limited human impact on marine biodiversity in pre-industrial Iceland.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
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17 authors.
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Abstract
Human activities are affecting marine biodiversity globally by accelerating extinction rates, altering ecosystem conditions and changing community structures. These changes can only be understood through establishing the ecosystem state prior to significant anthropogenic impact and by disentangling the anthropogenic effect from natural climatic changes. Here, we reconstruct marine biodiversity in Iceland across three millennia (1315 BCE-1785 CE), encompassing periods of climatic fluctuation and human settlement, to explore the comparative effect of natural and anthropogenic forces on marine biodiversity. We performed 18S metabarcoding of ancient environmental DNA from two sediment cores collected from northern Icelandic shelf seas, integrating local climatic records, population estimates and zooarchaeological remains from published sources to estimate the influence of climatic and anthropogenic impacts. Against the backdrop of increasing human populations and marine exploitation, we observe no large-scale taxonomic shifts or anthropogenic biodiversity changes across the period. In contrast, we found a positive correlation between herring (
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