new s • • www.pages-igbp.org Vol 19 No 2 July 2011 Integrative Paleoscience for Sustainable Management Editors: John Dearing, Markus Dotterweich, Thomas Foster, Louise Newman and Lucien von Gunten The Murray-Darling River system (southeastern Australia) drains 1/7 of the Australian land- mass and is known as the "food bowl" of the nation. Due to intense water and catchment use, much of the river system and associated water bodies are now significantly environ- mentally degraded. Psyche Bend Lagoon (River Murray floodplain) shown here, was first used for significant irrigation around AD 1890. Since this time, continued catchment change (stock grazing, land clearance, irrigation) has diminished ecosystem resiliance, which, in association with confounding effects of climate change, acidified this once pristine wet- land. Paleodata demonstrates that the natural system is now outside its natural range of variability. This newsletter issue highlights research that aims to provide new integrations of historical information at regional scales towards developing sustainable management strategies (Photo: P. Gell). Inside PAGES Staff updates versity of Johannes Antarctica2k, LUCIFS and the PAGES 2k Louise Newman will be relinquishing her Gutenberg, Germany. Network. position as PAGES Science Officer this Au- Daniel’s main re- Workshops scheduled later in the year gust. She will return to her native Tasma- search interests in- include the 3rd PALSEA workshop with a Announcements nia,e wher she has accepted the position clude lake sediments focuse on ic sheet modeling, a Greenland of Executive Officer of the Southern Ocean and cave records as Ice Sheet reconstruction workshop, the 2nd Observing System (SOOS). We wish her all archives of climatic ADOM Working Group workshop on dust the best in her new role. We are grateful and human history, and tephras as chron- dynamics, and a workshop on future drill- for her invaluable service, particularly with ological tools. ing activities in East African rift lakes. See churning out the PAGES newsletter and Min-Te Chen (Taiwan) is a Professor at PAGES calendar for details on these and coordinating the 2k Network. Louise will the National Taiwan Ocean University. He other meetings. be replaced by Lucien von Gunten, who received his PhD from Brown University had served as her maternity cover earlier, in 1994 and has since Support for meetings and is thus familiar with the responsibili- then led paleoceano- The next deadline for meeting propos- ties of the PAGES Science Officer. We are graphic and paleocli- als is 1 November 2011, for evaluation by pleasedo t welcome Lucien again, now as matological research the PAGES Executive Committee (EXCOM) ae mor permanent member of the PAGES of the western Pacific in December. To apply for meeting sup- International Project Office team. and East Asia in Tai- port, visit the PAGES website (My PAGES > On the subject of new arrivals, we wan. He has served as Meetings). congratulate Michelle Kaufmann, the a scientific committee PAGES Finance and Officer Manager, on member for IMAGES. Photos for products the birth of her daughter. Therese Jost will Sri Yudawati PAGES seeks high-resolution (min. 300 continue as her maternity cover until Oc- Cahyarini (Indone- dpi) digital photographs for its website, tober this year. sia) earned her PhD brochures, newsletter and other products. at IFM-GEOMAR, Pictures of fieldwork activities and land- Guest Scientist Kiel University, scapes (including paleoscientists at work), Darrell Kaufman of the Northern Arizona Germany in 2006 archives and proxies are solicited to spice University, USA, will join PAGES as resident before returning to up our products. All contributions will be Guest Scientist from July to November. Indonesia. Her re- acknowledged if used. Please email your Darrell’s scientific interest is centered on search interest is in high-resolution paleo- photographs to anand.chandrasekhar@ the Arctic over the course of the Holo- climate reconstruction from the geochem- pages.unibe.ch cene.t A PAGES he will contribute to the istry of fossil corals, particularly from Tahiti progress of the Arctic2k and SynTraCE-21 and Indonesia. “Yuda” has also served as a Next newsletter issues Working Groups. PAGES Guest Scientist. The next two forthcoming issues of PAGES If you’re interested in becoming a To view the list of PAGES National news will highlight IGBP and Japanese pa- PAGES Guest Scientist, please read the Contacts or the nomination guidelines, leoscience. The IGBP-focused newsletter guidelines on the PAGES website (My PAG- please visit the PAGES website (About > will feature paired topical articles and will ES > Get involved). National PAGES). provide different temporal perspectives on global change questions. The Japan-fo- New National Contacts Busy second semester cused newsletter will showcase the latest PAGES appointed three new National The second half of 2011 is a busy time for work of PAGES-relevant science in Japan. Contacts who are responsible for promot- PAGES, beginning with an abundance of Youe ar invited to submit Science ing and strengthening engagement with meetings being held in Bern, the Project Highlights, Program News and Workshop PAGES science at the national level. Office's host city. The biggest of them is Reports for the Open Section of PAGES Daniel Veres (Romania) is a researcher the 18th A INQU Congress, featuring sev- news. The next deadline for such contri- at the Institute of Speleology of the Roma- eral sessions and breakout meetings from butions is 31 Aug 2011. Guidelines for au- nian Academy and Babes-Bolyai Univer- PAGES Working Groups. The annual PAGES thors can be found on the PAGES website sity. in Cluj He has specialized in Quater- Scientific Steering Committee meeting (My PAGES > Newsletter). nary geology and paleoclimatology at the closely follows. Other PAGES Working University of Stockholm, Sweden and Uni- Groupst tha hold meetings in July include *** One-Stop-Shop *** New to the PAGES website is the "My PAGES" webpage! Offering a platform for the paleo-community to organize meetings, discuss data, browse publications and search for vacancies and events of interest. My PAGES is all about how you can contribute and make the most of the resources PAGES has to offer! www.pages-igbp.org/my-pages/intro 42 PAGES news • Vol 19 • No 2 • July 2011 Editorial: Integrative paleoscience for sustainable management John Dearing1, Markus Dotterweich2 anD thoMas Foster3 1School of Geography, University of Southampton, UK; [email protected] 2Institute of Geography, University of Mainz, Germany; 3Department of Anthropology, University of West Georgia, USA New integrations of historical information at regional scales are needed in order to provide a stronger basis for developing strategies for sustainable management and adaptation to global environmental change. Increasingly, international and national reports (e.g., Millennium Ecosystem As- Highlights: Editorial Science sessment, 2005; UK National Ecosystem Assessment, 2010) highlight the need to understand how interactions between so- ciety and the environment have evolved over multi-decadal timescales to create modern landscapes. Only with the per- spective afforded by a relatively long timescale of observations can modern landscapes be effectively treated as com- plex interacting systems and analyzed for complex behavior, such as thresholds. Direct observations and measurements obtained from long-term survey or moni- toring programs are usually too short or too limited in scope to provide a compre- hensive record on their own (Fig. 1). As an alternative, reconstructing long and comprehensive records can potentially be achieved through integrating instru- Figure 1: Slow and fast processes. Timescales for a range of biophysical and socio-economic phenomena range from ment, document, paleoenvironmental “fast” subannual events (e.g., floods, fire) to “slow” multidecadal and centennial changes (e.g., culture). Understand- ing contemporary socioecological systems may require information from a similar range of timescales, but sources and archeology records within regions to of information become more limited for longer timescales. The sources of information available for each segment produce “socio-environmental profiles”. of timescale with respect to the present are depicted by the horizontal lenses. Observations and measurements These profiles can provide the basis for (e.g., instruments, remote sensing, censuses, economic statistics) and documents (e.g., diaries, gazetteers, land use descriptions) may only be available for relatively short timescales. Changes over longer timescales that are essential assessing the relative degradation of dif- for assessing the role of “slow” processes (red shading) may need to be reconstructed. Reconstruction covers all ferent ecological services more effectively, the paleoenvironmental fields, including paleoecology, paleoclimatology, paleohydrology and archeology, which identifying and modeling complex socio- interpret artifacts and natural sediment archives (e.g., lake sediments, stalagmites, peat) in terms of past environ- ment and society. Reproduced from Dearing et al. (2010), after Oldfield (1983) and Brand (1999). environmental interactions, defining sys- tem behavior (e.g., trajectories and thresh- An understanding of socio-environ- publications. They show a wide range of olds), identifying baselines, and providing mental dynamics is important for the regions and contemporary issues that can theo means