Applying marine historical ecology to quantify long-term change in coastal ecosystems

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Ecological dynamics span nested scales of space and time, but determining the rate and consequences of ecological and environmental change can be difficult as studies are often spatially constrained and lack temporal depth. Over the past 300 years, anthropogenically driven shifts have occurred in the global oceans, influencing the distribution, abundance, and size structure of various marine organisms. The ecosystem consequences of these shifts have only recently been identified and thus the specific implications for management and conservation are still being evaluated. Concurrently, there has been increased recognition that archaeological data can extend historical ecosystem baselines in both time and space. Archaeological sites, and the animal remains preserved therein, represent archives of human and ecological history spanning millennia. As such, they have potential to reveal long-term ecological dynamics and change, and also to offer a direct line of inquiry into global bio-geochemical processes via environmental proxies of temperature, ocean acidification, and resource subsidies. My long-term research vision is to create a program centered on marine historical ecology' that employs archaeological data to: i) evaluate ecological hypotheses, ii) quantify long-term change in coastal ecosystems, and iii) broaden perspectives by informing contemporary management and conservation challenges. My HQP trainees and I will evaluate preindustrial Indigenous resource use represented by animal bones and shells in archaeological sites to identify the impact of persistent human predation on the long-term structure and dynamics of distributions, sizes, and abundances of marine species. By pursuing ecological research using archaeological data, we will provide general insight into the scale of ecosystem change transformed by centuries of industrial exploitation while also querying fundamental assumptions in ecological theory concerning long-term human influence on species interactions, specifically trophic cascades, tipping points, and climatic variability that can drive discontinuous phase shifts.To accomplish this vision, my short-term research goals are to mentor trainees in testing hypotheses related to five key questions in multiple regions of the British Columbia Coast. I will address these goals using two scales of analysis i) meta-analyses that integrate archaeological and ecological datasets across large spatial and temporal scales to identify change between ancient and modern marine ecosystems and ii) method development (applied at my established research sites and in the lab) to maximize biologically relevant information obtained from zooarchaeological data.