About this Working Group: 

The Bahamas Archipelago (The Bahamas, Turks & Caicos Islands) sits at the intersection of multiple global change issues emblematic of Anthropocene-era challenges. The region has a dynamic biocultural history characterized by multiple pre-Columbian and historic-era human migration events and species extirpations, extinctions, and invasions. This region represents a tractable system in which to explore vertebrate diversity and ecosystem function through time as it relates to human behaviors past and present that have until now been studied in isolation by different disciplines, and where research initiatives have largely excluded conservation community input.  

This Working Group will foster data sharing, discussion, networking, and product-oriented engagement across participants to mobilize existing paleobiological (e.g., paleontological, archaeological, paleoenvironmental) datasets and inspire research on surviving and extinct endemic vertebrates as they relate to sustaining ecosystems and conservation. We use this Working Group to show how global biodiversity targets can be translated to local ecological and human cultural contexts, and how to best position projects for success by generating robust and reasonable outcome expectations using paleobiological data. 

Our aims are aligned with global biodiversity goals that have been scaled to local needs based on preliminary discussions with local practitioners. They include: (1) Identify the temporal and spatial scale of human drivers of loss spanning Indigenous, European, and more contemporary time spans; (2) Using these baselines of taxa through time, we can then address species-specific goals; (3) Employ paleobiological data in new modeling and computational approaches to reconstruct ecosystem functions through time and across space, and species losses in the context of conservation translocations and “rewilding”; (4) Ensure equitable benefits of research and conservation implementation.