Policy makers and resource managers must make decisions that affect the resilience and sustainability of natural resources, including biodiversity and ecosystem services. However, these decisions are often based on evidence or theory derived from highly altered systems and over short time periods of low-magnitude environmental and climatic change. Because natural systems change and evolve across multiple timescales from instantaneous to millennial, long-term understanding of how past life has responded to perturbations can inform resource managers. By using these natural laboratories of the past, conservation paleobiology and paleoecology provide the framework necessary to anticipate and plan for future changes. The goal of this Research Topic is to heighten awareness among conservation and restoration practitioners to the value and applications of long-term perspectives provided by conservation paleobiology and paleoecology. Most conservation studies focus on systems already impacted by anthropogenic change; these studies would benefit from paleontological data through expanded temporal scales, identification of baselines, and an understanding of how organisms have responded to past changes. However, resource management decisions rarely include input from paleontologists, and paleoecological research is rarely incorporated into conservation decision-making. We seek to bridge this research-implementation gap by highlighting the application of paleoecological data to issues such as biodiversity dynamics, extinction risks, and resilience to perturbations, among other topics. We hope to foster new cross-disciplinary synergies by encouraging conservation scientists and managers to collaborate with paleontologists to improve conservation decision-making and by increasing awareness among paleontologists to the needs of the resource management community. This Research Topic will provide a forum for both the paleontological and resource management communities to exchange ideas that will enhance restoration and conservation decision-making. We invite papers on conceptual advances, reviews of specific topics to guide efforts in research or practice, case studies of successful applications, articles describing datasets with applied value, and perspective papers summarizing a body of paleontological research with relevance to the resource management community. Topics can include but are not limited to: • Responses of species, communities, and ecosystems to perturbations • Strategies to achieve the direct integration of paleobiology and paleoecology into on-ground resource management • Identifying baselines and reference conditions • Increasing the robustness of forecasting models through the incorporation of paleontological data • Identifying key species, interactions, and other phenomena as indicators of impending change • New methodologies, analytical tools, and/or proxies in the application of paleontological data to conservation and restoration practice Lynn Wingard, Damien Fordham, and Greg Dietl have no conflicts of interest. Chris Schneider has a potential conflict of interest where manuscripts pertain to stakeholders in the petroleum industry, as she is an independent contractor in the Alberta Oil Sands mining area.

In conservation, perhaps no better example exists of the past informing the present than the return of the California condor to the Vermilion Cliffs of Arizona. Extinct in the region for nearly one hundred years, condors were successfully reintroduced starting in the 1990s in an effort informed by the fossil record—condor skeletal remains had been found in the area’s late-Pleistocene cave deposits. The potential benefits of applying such data to conservation initiatives are unquestionably great, yet integrating the relevant disciplines has proven challenging. Conservation Paleobiology gathers a remarkable array of scientists—from Jeremy B. C. Jackson to Geerat J. Vermeij—to provide an authoritative overview of how paleobiology can inform both the management of threatened species and larger conservation decisions. Studying endangered species is difficult. They are by definition rare, some exist only in captivity, and for those still in their native habitats any experimentation can potentially have a negative effect on survival. Moreover, a lack of long-term data makes it challenging to anticipate biotic responses to environmental conditions that are outside of our immediate experience. But in the fossil and prefossil records—from natural accumulations such as reefs, shell beds, and caves to human-made deposits like kitchen middens and archaeological sites—enlightening parallels to the Anthropocene can be found that might serve as a primer for present-day predicaments. Offering both deep-time and near-time perspectives and exploring a range of ecological and evolutionary dynamics and taxa from terrestrial as well as aquatic habitats, Conservation Paleobiology is a sterling demonstration of how the past can be used to manage for the future, giving new hope for the creation and implementation of successful conservation programs.

This volume describes and explores the emerging discipline of conservation paleobiology, and addresses challenges faced by established and young Conservation Paleobiologist's alike. In addition, this volume includes applied research highlighting how conservation paleobiology can be used to understand ecosystem response to perturbation in near and deep time. Across 10 chapters, the book aims to (1) explore the goals of conservation paleoecology as a science, (2) highlight how conservation paleoecology can be used to understand ecosystems’ responses to crises, (3) provide case studies of applications to modern ecosystems, (4) develop novel applications of paleontological approaches to neontological data, and (5) present a range of ecosystem response and recovery through environmental crises, from high-resolution impacts on organism interactions to the broadest scale of responses of the entire marine biosphere to global change. The volume will be of interest to paleoecologists, paleobiologists, and conservation biologists.

Why is Biological Diversity Important; Where is the worlds biodiversity located; Extinction;how serios is the theart; What happening to agricultural genetic diversity;Biodiversity conservation: what are the right tools for the job.

This pioneering volume provides a blueprint for managing the challenges of ocean conservation using marine historical ecology—an interdisciplinary area of study that is helping society to gain a more in-depth understanding of past human-environmental interactions in coastal and marine ecosystems and of the ecological and social outcomes associated with these interactions. Developed by groundbreaking practitioners in the field, Marine Historical Ecology in Conservation highlights the innovative ways that historical ecology can be applied to improve conservation and management efforts in the oceans. The book focuses on four key challenges that confront marine conservation: (1) recovering endangered species, (2) conserving fisheries, (3) restoring ecosystems, and (4) engaging the public. Chapters emphasize real-world conservation scenarios appropriate for students, faculty, researchers, and practitioners in marine science, conservation biology, natural resource management, paleoecology, and marine and coastal archaeology. By focusing on success stories and applied solutions, this volume delivers the required up-to-date science and tools needed for restoration and protection of ocean and coastal ecosystems.

In North America, concepts of Historical Range of Variability are being employed in land-management planning for properties of private organizations and multiple government agencies. The National Park Service, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, and The Nature Conservancy all include elements of historical ecology in their planning processes. Similar approaches are part of land management and conservation in Europe and Australia. Each of these user groups must struggle with the added complication of rapid climate change, rapid land-use change, and technical issues in order to employ historical ecology effectively. Historical Environmental Variation in Conservation and Natural Resource Management explores the utility of historical ecology in a management and conservation context and the development of concepts related to understanding future ranges of variability. It provides guidance and insights to all those entrusted with managing and conserving natural resources: land-use planners, ecologists, fire scientists, natural resource policy makers, conservation biologists, refuge and preserve managers, and field practitioners. The book will be particularly timely as science-based management is once again emphasized in United States federal land management and as an understanding of the potential effects of climate change becomes more widespread among resource managers. Additional resources for this book can be found at: www.wiley.com/go/wiens/historicalenvironmentalvariation.