ANTICIPATORY SCIENCE FOR CHANGING LANDSCAPES: DOES QUATERNARY HISTORY MATTER?

Adaptation to environmental change in the 21st Century calls for retooling both science and management to deal with fast-evolving and novel landscapes. Is Quaternary science irrelevant or indispensable in formulating new approaches to forecast and manage this uncertain future? In western North America, for example, earlier and warmer growing seasons, biological invasions, and historical land use and management are rendering landscapes vulnerable to abrupt and synchronized disturbances, plant die-offs, and ecosystem transformations. Confronted with novel ecosystem change, land managers now have to consider multiple stresses, as well as multiple successional pathways. The science and management challenge will be how to monitor, forecast, and engineer the products of succession, on a subcontinental scale and under a continually-changing climate. A necessary step towards this larger objective is the implementation of anticipatory science and management at relevant temporal and spatial scales. Quaternary scientists will be called upon to better define historical baselines needed to adjust for future trajectories; quantify rate changes for ecological and geomorphic processes; and identify shifting teleconnections for plant dispersal, bird migration, precipitation recycling, and dust production and transport. We will need to serve up historical information in formats useful for testing, parameterizing, and initializing ecosystem models driven by climatic projections. This historical information can be integrated directly into decision-support models linked to both near-term (season to years and long-term (decades to century) climatic predictions, and will be critical for continually recalibrating environmental scenarios and management strategies. Many of our long-term ecological research sites are being compromised by human impacts, and well-studied paleoecological sites are being destroyed by fire, land use, and accelerated erosion. If history truly matters, and baselines are essential in a changing world, then we need to identify a historical reference network and step up efforts to protect the most important sites at which to maintain comparable measurements and observations.