Marine and terrestrial ecosystems have been affected by anthropogenic stressors (e.g., biological invasions, eutrophication, land use change, overexploitation) for centuries to millennia. By covering only recent decades, scientific surveys and monitoring are insufficient to fully assess human impacts and the long-term ecosystem status. Predicting future changes and effectively restoring degraded communities without knowing past species and ecosystem responses and historical baselines is thus challenging. The fossil record and other palaeoecological archives (e.g., biogeochemical or isotopic signatures of sediment cores and/or archaeological middens) provide long-term data that document past disturbances and their effects on organisms and ecosystem structure (e.g., body size changes, taxonomic and functional composition, diversity patterns). In addition, deep-time palaeoecological records provide analogue scenarios for present-day environmental perturbations, capturing extirpations and recovery dynamics of ecosystems at evolutionary timescales.
Therefore, this session will explore how interdisciplinary approaches to palaeoecological records can enhance the interpretation of the temporal dynamics of past (deep-time and Quaternary) ecosystems and thus provide context and guidance for the near-future dynamics of modern ecosystems. We will address major challenges of interpreting palaeoecological records. For example, a proper understanding of their spatial and temporal resolution is needed to reconstruct long-term ecosystem dynamics and historical baselines. It is also crucial to know how the ecologic information preserved in the fossil record is affected by taphonomic biases. Despite these challenges palaeoecological records are highly useful for conservation efforts. This will be demonstrated by case studies using a wide range of tools and analytical approaches from palaeontology, palaeoecology, stratigraphy, historical ecology, and archaeology.