Shifting the baseline and assessing its impact on the status and trends of biodiversity and its implication for decision-making in conservation

Centuries-old data have challenged assumptions on the distribution and conservation status of biodiversity and yet, most of the decision-making in conservation relies on space-for-time substitutions or relatively recent, or modelled, data.

With BaseShift, my goal is to quantify the impact of using different baselines to assess the trends and status of biodiversity and ecosystem services as well as its implication on the resulting conservation priorities and actions.

To do so, I will compare the outputs of commonly used approaches and tools in conservation biology when using different reference points in time, using data from Spain in the 16th, 19th, and 21st centuries.

Specifically, I will focus on four key components of conservation practice, that is (1) species conservation status, (2) prioritization for area-based conservation, (3) detection of change, and (4) species environmental niches. When appropriate, the valuation of historical species-derived ecosystem services will be integrated in the analysis.

Beyond new fundamental knowledge in historical ecology and conservation biology, the outputs of BaseShift will contribute to improve biodiversity assessments, target setting and progress monitoring and ultimately better policy and decision-making in biodiversity conservation.