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

生态动态跨越空间和时间的嵌套尺度，但确定生态和环境变化的速度和后果可能很困难，因为研究往往受到空间限制，缺乏时间深度。在过去的300年里，全球海洋发生了人类驱动的变化，影响了各种海洋生物的分布、丰度和大小结构。直到最近才确定这些变化的生态系统后果，因此对管理和养护的具体影响仍在评估中。与此同时，人们越来越认识到，考古数据可以在时间和空间上扩展历史生态系统基线。考古遗址和保存在其中的动物遗骸代表着跨越数千年的人类和生态历史的档案。因此，它们有可能揭示长期的生态动态和变化，并通过温度、海洋酸化和资源补贴等环境指标提供对全球生物地球化学过程的直接调查。*我的长期研究愿景是创建一个以海洋历史生态学为中心的项目，该项目利用考古数据：i)评估生态假说，ii)量化沿海生态系统的长期变化，iii)通过告知当代管理和保护挑战来拓宽视角。我和我的HQP学员将评估考古遗址中以动物骨骼和贝壳为代表的工业化前土著资源的使用，以确定人类持续捕食对海洋物种分布、大小和丰度的长期结构和动态的影响。通过使用考古数据进行生态研究，我们将提供对几个世纪的工业开发所改变的生态系统变化规模的总体洞察，同时也质疑生态学理论中关于人类对物种相互作用的长期影响的基本假设，特别是可以驱动不连续相变的营养级联、临界点和气候变化。*为了实现这一愿景，我的短期研究目标是指导受训人员在不列颠哥伦比亚省海岸的多个地区测试与五个关键问题相关的假设。我将使用两个分析尺度来解决这些目标：一)荟萃分析，将大时空尺度上的考古和生态数据集结合起来，以确定古代和现代海洋生态系统之间的变化；二)方法开发(在我已建立的研究地点和实验室中应用)，以最大限度地利用从动物考古数据获得的生物学相关信息。

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.