Whether at the finer scale of conservation paleobiology or under the umbrella of conservation science, the integration of elements from numerous fields and sub-fields is in recognition of the fact that ecosystems are complex systems, and, in conservation and restoration, many stakeholders and their goals must be considered.

This brings us to the second important implication of the definition: conservation paleobiology is a goal-oriented, value-driven field. Broadly, the goals are to conserve and restore present-day biodiversity and ecosystem services. By extension of these goals, value is placed on biodiversity and ecosystem services: they are considered to be “good.” As we will explore in the section on the broader field of conservation biology, these goals are often much more specific and are often motivated by the stakeholders involved in the decision-making process. Nonetheless, research in conservation science strongly adheres to the scientific process. Research questions and experimental designs do cater to specific areas of need or interest, but when it comes to collecting, analyzing, and interpreting the data, bias plays no part in the process. Conservation is a science-driven pursuit and applies the best available information to the decision-making process.

Directly or indirectly, studies in conservation paleobiology use the past history of life to contextualize the world around us today and this context can be applied to improve the decisions made in conservation and restoration practice. Using the past history of life can be challenging because it requires that we think about long-acting processes and timescales well beyond the duration of a single human life. It requires geohistorical thinking.

To think geohistorically, it is important to first recognize that today represents only a very brief moment in time. Compared to the amount of time that has already passed, and will come to pass in the future, the current moment represents less time than the blink of an eye as compared to the duration of your life. As you begin to appreciate the vastness of time, you can also start to understand more thoroughly that the world is constantly changing. By contrast, compared to many human processes and concerns, the natural world can seem constant. On human timescales, ecosystems can appear stable: a forest from your childhood is still a forest today. This appearance of stability has driven many conservation and restoration goals, as people have sought to maintain, or regain, a particular set of ecosystem conditions based on their idea of what is “natural.” Failure to recognize change in the world will prime these efforts to fail, as the world continues to change—with or without human driven climate change. Embracing a geohistorical pattern of thought means incorporating dynamism into our restoration and conservation efforts. It means recognizing that the past provides context for the world around us today, just as the world around us today will be our frame of reference for the future. Geohistorical thinking, because it considers events and processes beyond the scope of human observation, requires data sources that are outside the standard purview of conservation science. These data sources often take the form of geohistorical records.

By using proxies from ice cores and other geohistorical records to understand how the environment has changed over time (learn more in the section on Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction), we can use evidence from fossils to begin to evaluate how life has responded to different scenarios in the past. With this approach, which is commonly used in deep-time conservation paleobiology, the fossil record can be considered a natural laboratory, where thousands and thousands of experiments have been running throughout the history of life. Alternatively, in near-time conservation paleobiology, species found in the fossil record are often still living and, because this approach focuses on the relatively young fossil record, can be used in more direct comparisons to the modern world. Simply put, the near-time approach provides spatial and temporal context for the distributions and interactions of species in modern ecosystems and the deep-time approach helps us build potential scenarios for how species and ecosystems are changing in response to changing environmental conditions, some of which may impact modern times or have the potential to arise in our future.

Informative as they may be, it can be challenging to interpret geohistorical records because they tend to be time-averaged and taphonomically altered (learn more about the concepts time-averaging and taphonomy). Time-averaging occurs due to the mixing of fossils from organisms that did not live at the same time, and may have lived a year, a decade, a century, or a millennium apart. For a more familiar example, we can consider a cemetery. If you were to walk through a cemetery, you would notice that the dates on the tombstones are from the 2000s, 1900s, 1800s, and maybe even further back in time. Though some of these people lived in overlapping times, a person who lived in the 2000s and another from the 1800s almost certainly did not live at the same time. This fundamental attribute of geohistorical records must be considered when data from these records are interpreted and applied.

Much like time averaging, taphonomic alteration also needs to be considered when interpreting and applying data from geohistorical records. Taphonomy refers to the suite of processes that can alter the remains of organisms from their time of death to their time of study. These processes can include consumption or scavenging of the remains, breakage by environmental factors, removal from the record by erosional processes, or distortion by geological processes, to name a few. As these processes can remove important data, it is important to understand whether, and to what extent, the geohistorical record has been altered before making conservation or restoration decisions based on these records. Though taphonomy (and time-averaging) can make it more challenging to interpret the geohistorical record, it does not preclude it from being useful in conservation and restoration practice.