Restoring habitats to how they were centuries ago, not years ago, could mean more successful conservation efforts
Time is one of humanity’s greatest blind spots. We experience it as days, months, or years. But nature functions on much grander scales, measured in centuries, millennia and even longer intervals often lumped together as “deep time.” As paleontologists, we were trained to think in deep time. Yet, as conservationists, we’ve come to realize that time can be confounding.
A deep time perspective can improve conservation efforts, and our work could make those perspectives easier to visualize. But how can we know what an ecosystem looked like 100 years ago? 1,000 years ago? One pathway is through modern mathematical modeling. Along with another paleontologist, Roxanne Banker, we have married this kind of modeling with streams of long-term data—for example, natural history museum collections, Indigenous ecological knowledge and the fossil record—and discovered a possible way to preserve the ecosystem of California’s kelp forest, now nearly destroyed.
Our model described the interactions between giant kelp and understory algae competing for light and space on the seafloor, sea urchins that consume both kelp and algae, and sunflower sea stars and sea otters that prey on the urchins. We then used the model to predict how the system responds to marine heat waves and outbreaks of sea star wasting disease, recreating the events of the past 10 years.
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