Species conservation has long focused on preventing human-driven extinctions. However, recently calls have been made for a parallel focus on species recovery. This call to action within the conservation community is fueled in part by the recognition that baselines of species abundance and distribution have shifted dramatically across human generations, with globally detectable human impacts on ecosystems beginning at least several thousand years ago. While assessment of extinction risk generally only considers species’ change over the past few decades, assessment of recovery requires considering change over centuries to millennia. A new IUCN assessment of species recovery, the Green Status of Species, formalizes this need, requiring assessors to identify species’ baseline status at the time when humans first became a major factor influencing their abundance and distribution. This Working Group will leverage the wealth of paleoecological and historical ecological data to facilitate estimation of species pre-impact distribution baselines. We will do so in a way that is accessible to conservation practitioners, helping to unshift the baseline and bring species recovery into the mainstream.