Shifting Baselines Essay

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Shifting Baselines Shifting baselines is the term used to describe the gradual change of our ecological conditions. This gradual change happens with each new coming generation because each generation lacks knowledge of the ecological conditions in the past. The current ecological condition is what each generation defines to be the “normal” conditions. The first person to bring up this concept was Daniel Pauly, a marine biologist, who noticed a disappearance of fish species in fisheries. While studying these fisheries he concluded that for each generation of fishers and marine scientists, the current population of fish was their baseline and they could measure ecological data from that baseline. Pauly published his idea in 1995, in a paper called Trend is Ecology and Evolution. Historical evidence has proved that fish were once very abundant in the past before people began fishing. Over time the fish population has gradually decreased. But each generation believes otherwise. Each generation sets their baseline from what they have grown up with and people don’t know it was different back then. The Earth began with an abundant number of fish, but then as humans began to fish, their population began to decrease. Then the next generation believes that the number of fish leftover from the past generation is the normal population size. Then the data changes as the number of fish change overtime, then the next generation take the leftovers and start their baseline from there, and so on. Shifting baselines are important to conservation because people should not base their scientific data on what they believe is their baseline because that’s what they grew up with. Each new generation needs to know the ecological conditions in the past so that they are aware of how the environment was in the past. Historical data helps marine scientists keep track and monitor the

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