COLLABORATIONS WITH AGENCIES WHILE STAYING IN ACADEMIC GEOLOGY: BALANCING APPLIED AND BASIC SCIENCE WHEN ASSESSING HUMAN MODIFICATION OF COASTAL ECOSYSTEMS

13 years ago, a meta-analysis of published “live-dead datasets” that was motivated to test the reliability of paleoecological information in deep-time molluscan assemblages revealed that “live-dead discordance” in species composition does not arise from post-mortem transport nor from bias related to shell durability, but instead from displacement of the living from their ecologic baseline. Importantly, apparently only human-driven changes are sufficient to register this way, probably because so many anthropogenic stressors are severe, chronic, or permanent. Field tests by many authors since then – also using samples from the surface mixed layer, not cores -- confirm that contrasts between living communities and naturally time-averaged death assemblages are a reliable signal of ecological/ environmental changes driven by human activities, such as altered sediment and nutrient runoff, bottom trawling, climate change, and species introductions. Many academics now have or are developing relationships with municipal, state, and federal agencies to test for and quantify stress gradients and shifted baselines that could only be suspected using conventional monitoring data. Here I describe the results – and mutual benefits -- of a collaboration begun in 2005 with four wastewater agencies in southern California. It started as a cooperation -- access to their live data and dead-shell discards let me quantify shell preservation in shelf habitats prohibitively expensive for academic sampling. It then expanded to questions of theirs (dredge-spoil detection, pre-monitoring baselines, surrogates of total-fauna data) that still provided valuable paleobiological insights. But the really strong response came when we introduced geologic age-dating of “dead-only” species to assess taphonomic lags. Agency biologists immediately grasped the value of learning whena species went into decline, versus simple presence-absence evidence that it had done so before the onset of monitoring. “Saving the dead” is now standard protocol of benthic monitoring and synoptic surveys in southern California, and word-of-mouth of success there has led to new collaborations in the Pacific NW, where we will search for elusive “indicator taxa” and urban effects while testing for latitudinal variation in carbonate preservation.