History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP)

Objectives

To achieve its aim, HMAP has three principal objectives:

• Institutional Development: to sustain the initiative, HMAP is developing institutional bases at the universities of Roskilde (Denmark), Hull (UK), New Hampshire (USA) and Murdoch (Australia);
• Discipline Building: to further the twin sub-disciplines of marine environmental history and historical ecology, HMAP organises graduate summer schools, conferences and workshops;
• Research: to enhance knowledge and understanding of ecosystem dynamics, HMAP sponsors teams of historians, archaeologists, marine ecologists, biologists and fisheries scientists to analyse historical and environmental data relating to the exploitation by humans of marine animal populations over the last 2000 years. This research effort is currently focused on the following regional and thematic case studies (** = research completed):

	**South West African Shelf	(lead: University of Cape Town)
	**South East Australian Shelf and Slope	(CSIRO, Tasmania)
	South West Pacific	(NIWA, Wellington, NZ)
	Indonesian Shark Fishery	(Murdoch, Western Australia)
	Filipino Whale Fishery	(Manila, Philippines)
	Taiwanese Tuna Fishery	(Murdoch, Western Australia)
	Caribbean Sea	(Scripps Institution, San Diego)
	**Newfoundland & Grand Banks	(University of Hull)
	Gulf of Maine Cod Fishery	(University of New Hampshire)
	White and Barents Seas	(European University at St Petersburg)
	Baltic	(Estonian Marine Institute/DIFRES, C’hagen)
	North Sea (medieval)	(University of York)
	North Sea (modern)	(University of Hull)
	Mediterranean and Black Sea	(Universities of Haifa & Southern Denmark)
	World Whaling	(University of New Hampshire)
	Mega Molluscs	(Simon Bolivar University, Venezuela)

Project Schedule

HMAP is integral to the Census of Marine Life programme (www.coml.org), a global network of researchers in more than 80 countries engaged in a scientific initiative to assess and explain the diversity, distribution and abundance of life in the oceans - past, present and future.

HMAP I, 2000: scoping the project; assembling the team; designing the research programme

HMAP II, 2001-2002: establishing the institutional core; founding a new disciplinary approach; launching pilot research projects

HMAP III, 2003-2007: consolidating the institutional core; building the sub-disciplines of marine environmental history and historical marine ecology; developing the research effort; connecting with the scientific and historical community and the general public

HMAP IV, 2007-2009: synthesizing the research findings using population and ecological modelling of the data generated

HMAP V, 2009-2010: disseminating the results

HMAP III was concluded by 30 June 2007. HMAP IV commenced on 1 July 2007 and will conclude on 30 June 2009. The project is largely funded by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation (New York City).

Approach: Recovering the Knowable over Time and Ocean Space

HMAP research seeks to recover what we can know about life in the oceans through historical time in order to understand the current and future patterns of marine species diversity. The story of what did live in the oceans provides the essential context for understanding what lives in the oceans now and what will live in the oceans in the future.

Such a story can never be fully told. In this, the history of life in the oceans is similar to ‘conventional’ histories of people and societies. We know, or think we know, what human life was like in the past. We learn about it from older generations, by observing relics of bygone ages, from scholarly studies and popular media. But our knowledge of the past relies on interpretations of evidence that has survived the attrition of time and economy. Inevitably, therefore, it is partial knowledge, so that much of the underlying history of human life remains unknown. At the same time, we are aware that research can reduce the scope of this unknown to an unknowable core of occurrences, trends, and opinions that can never be recovered. This awareness energizes the investigations and stimulates the imaginations of those who seek to understand the past.

If this is the case for students of past human life, it is even more so for those concerned with the role of humans in the evolution of the natural environment. Here, the partiality of the human record is compounded by a general ignorance of how and why – and with what effect – ecological conditions change over the long term. From the historical records we often can see the dynamic effects, but not always the causes, of human-induced and natural changes in marine ecosystems. The scale of such effects and our perceptions of their causality vary over time and space. While it is generally true that the further we go back in time the more difficult it is to retrieve the known from the unknown, some ocean realms are more amenable than others to scientific enquiry and therefore yield more evidence on the dynamic interplay of factors that condition ecological change. As the historical component of the Census of Marine Life program, HMAP is confronted by such temporal and spatial difficulties in its quest to use human experience to explain the abundance, diversity and distribution of past marine animal populations.

We have addressed this challenge by constructing an analytical framework that embraces two basic premises. First, much of what we can know about the history of the oceans will be in the “human edges” of the ocean, those in the nearshore and coastal zone.  This is where humans most directly interacted with the sea – as a source of food, a means of transportation, a theatre of war and a recreational zone – and therefore most historical records relate to these activities.  Second, moving from the unknown to the known history of the oceans must combine historical analysis with ecological analysis in a truly interdisciplinary way.   In essence, this involves appraisal and analysis of records of the human activity that has had the greatest impact on marine ecosystems over historic time, the commercial fisheries conducted primarily on the human edges of the ocean. These are the fisheries of the continental shelves of Europe, southern Africa, and Australasia, and the relatively shallow seas of the Caribbean, Mediterranean and Baltic, where much of the HMAP research effort has focused.  In addition, in both the human edges and in the central oceanic waters there have been extensive fisheries for larger organisms where records are extant for some periods, and HMAP projects have also focused on whaling from the 17th century onwards, and on large fishes such as bluefin tuna, where the sheer size and the value of the organisms encouraged the creation and maintenance of archival material.

Innovative approaches mark the HMAP investigation. For instance, archaeological techniques are being deployed in conjunction with historical methods to explore the character and composition of marine animal populations in the North Sea during early medieval times. Across the Atlantic, statistical modeling and evidence from virgin source materials have conjoined to provide benchmarks against which current species abundance can be measured. For example, in 8.5 months during 1855, the hand-lining fishermen in 43 schooners from Beverly, Massachusetts, caught a little over 8,000 tonnes of cod on the Scotian Shelf, whereas in 15 months during 1999-2000 a total of just 7,200 tonnes of cod was extracted from the same waters by the entire Canadian mechanized fishing fleet – a comparison that points to a profound change in productivity on the Scotian Shelf over the past 150 years. Likewise, research into the first commercial fishery to work the grounds of the South East Australian Shelf has revealed the extent to which human harvesting impacted upon ‘pristine’ stocks, while ecosystem modelling has established baselines for future conservation targets.

The structure and vision of HMAP highlights the power of an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the long term development of life in the ocean. Historical research reveals what we can know about the history of ocean exploitation and changing coastal communities. Ecological and historical analysis offers insight into the changes in human and natural systems over historical time. It also reveals what we do not yet know and, in some cases, cannot know about these changes. Only the interdisciplinary combination of expertise can fully develop the scope of what is known, unknown and unknowable about the environmental history of the oceans.

Results

The findings of the HMAP research effort are disseminated in the following forms:

Research Datasets: the HMAP Data Pages (this site) is an open access facility that currently holds approximately 300,000 records, a resource that is scheduled to increase to over 1,000,000 records by mid 2010. The majority of these data are disseminated through the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS: http://www.iobis.org).

Books: among the books produced by the HMAP team are:

	The Exploited Sea: New Directions in Marine Environmental History, edited by P. Holm, T.D. Smith & David J Starkey (St John’s, Nfld, 2001)
	Oceans Past: Management Insights from the History of Marine Animal Populations, edited by David J Starkey, P. Holm & Michaela Barnard (London, 2007)
	Fisheries Research, HMAP Special Issue, edited by B.R. MacKenzie & H. Ojaveer (2007)
	René Taudel Poulsen, An Environmental History of North Sea Ling and Cod Fisheries, 1840-1914 (Fiskeri- og Søfartsmuseets, Esbjerg, 2007)
	Shifting Baselines in the Sea: Using the Past to Inform the Present, edited by J.B.C. Jackson, E.S. Sala (University of California Press, in review)

Journal Articles & Chapters in Books: among the articles and chapters produced by the HMAP team are:

	Barrett, James, Locker, A., Roberts, C. 2004. ‘The origins of intensive marine fishing in medieval Europe: the English evidence’, Proceedings of the Royal Society, 271: 2417-2421.
	Griffiths C. L., L. van Sittert, P. B.  Best, A. C. Brown,  P.A. Cook,  R. J. M. Crawford, J. H. M. David,  B. R. Davies,  M. H.  Griffiths, K. Hutchings, A. Jerardino,  N. Kruger,  S. Lamberth,   R.  Leslie, R. Melville-Smith , R. Tarr  and  C. D. van der Lingen. 2004.  ‘Impacts of Human Activities on Marine Animal Life in the Benguela: An Historical Overview,’ Oceanography and Marine Biology: An Annual Review, 42: 303-392.
	Jeraldino, A and Navarro,R. 2002. Cape rock lobster (Jasus lalandii) remains from South African west coast shell middens:  preservational factors and possible bias. J Archaolol. Sci. 29: 993-999.
	Jerardino, A., Navarro, R. & Nilssen, P. 2001. Cape rock lobster (Jasus lalandii) exploitation in the past: estimating carapace length from mandible sizes. South African Journal of Science 97: 59-62.
	Van Sittert, L. and  Crawford, R. 2003. Historical reconstruction of guano production on the Namibian islands 1843-1895. S. Afr. J. Sci. 99: 1-4.
	Klaer, N.L. 2001. ‘Steam trawl catches from south eastern Australia from 1918 to 1957: trends in catch rates and species composition’. Marine and Freshwater Research, 52: 399-410.
	Klaer, Neil. 2004. ‘Abundance indices for main commercial fish species caught by trawl from the south-eastern Australian continental shelf from 1918 to 1957’. Marine and Freshwater Research 55(6):  561–571.
	Rosenberg, A. A. et al. 2005. ‘The history of ocean resources:  Modeling cod biomass using historical records’. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 2: 84-90.
	Leavenworth, W. B., 2006. ‘Opening Pandora’s Box: Tradition, competition and technology on the Scotian Shelf, 1852-1860’ in David J Starkey & J. Candow (eds), The North Atlantic Fisheries: Supply, Marketing and Consumption, 1560-1990 (Hull).
	Reeves, R.R. and T.D. Smith. 2006. ‘A Taxonomy of World Whaling: operations and eras’ Pp. 82-101 In Estes et al. (Eds). Whales, Whaling and Ocean Ecosystems (Univ. of California Press)
	Smith, T.D., and R.R. Reeves. 2006.  ‘Pre-20th century whaling: implications for management in the 21st century’ pp. 119-134 in J.E. Ringstad. Whaling and History II (Hvalfangstmuseum, Sandefjord, Norway).
	Reeves, R.R., T.D. Smith and E.A. Josephson. 2007. Near-annihilation of a species: right whaling in the North Atlantic. Pp. 75-104 In S.D. Kraus and R.M. Rolland (eds.) The Urban Whale (Harvard University Press).
	Smith, T.D, K. Bartlemess and R.R. Reeves. 2006. ‘Using historical records to relocate a long forgotten summer feeding ground of the North Atlantic right whales’ Marine Mammal Science 22: 732-734.
	Punt, A., Friday, N. and Smith, T.D. 2007. ‘Reconciling data on the trends and abundance of North Atlantic humpback whales within a population modeling framework’ Journal of Cetacean Research and Management 8: 145-160.
	Poulsen, R., Cooper, A.,Holm, P. ‘The importance of historical baselines to fisheries management - an abundance estimate of ling (Molvamolva) and cod (Gadus morhua) the northeastern North Sea, 1872’ Fisheries Research, 87 (2-3), Nov 2007.
	Poulsen, B., Holm, P. ‘A fishery of historical magnitude. Reconstructing the 17th-19th centuries catches of herring, eel, whitefish and plaice in Limfjorden, Denmark’ Fisheries Research, 87 (2-3), Nov 2007.
	Bager, M., Søndergaard, M. K.  ‘The Danish Baltic Sea fisheries c. 1875-1911’ Fisheries Research, 87 (2-3), Nov 2007.
	MacKenzie, B. R., Myers, R. A. ‘The development of the northern European fishery for north Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) during 1900-1950’ Fisheries Research, 87 (2-3), Nov 2007.
	Eero, M., MacKenzie, B. R., Karlsdottir, H. ‘Dynamics of international fisheries for cod (Gadus Gaumiga, R.morhua) in the eastern Baltic Sea during 1880-1938’ Fisheries Research, 87 (2-3), Nov 2007.
	Enghoff, I. B., MacKenzie, B. R. Nielsen, E. E. ‘The Danish fish fauna during the warm Atlantic period (ca. 7000 - 3900 BC): forerunner of future changes?’ Fisheries Research, 87 (2-3), Nov 2007.
	Lotze, H. ‘Rise and fall of fishing and marine resource use in the Wadden Sea, southern North Sea’ Fisheries Research, 87 (2-3), Nov 2007.
	Gaumiga, R., Karlsons, G., Uzars, D. ‘Gulf of Riga (Baltic Sea) fisheries in the late 17th century’ Fisheries Research, 87 (2-3), Nov 2007.
	Ojaveer, H. Lajus, J., Tammiksaar, E. ‘Fishing in the NE Baltic during the 19th century: what can be learned from the archives of Karl Ernst von Baer?’ Fisheries Research, 87 (2-3), Nov 2007.
	Lajus, D., Alekseeva, Y., Lajus, J. ‘Herring fisheries in the White and Barents Sea in the 18th - beginning of the 20th cc: factors effecting the catch fluctuations’ Fisheries Research, 87 (2-3), Nov 2007.
	Lajus, D., Dmitrieva, Z., Kraikovski, Lajus, J., Yurchenko, A., Alexandrov D. ‘Historical records of the 17 – 18th century fisheries for Atlantic salmon in northern Russia: methodology and case studies of population dynamics’ Fisheries Research, 87 (2-3), Nov 2007.
	Lajus, J., Kraikovski, A., Lajus, D. ‘Coastal fisheries in the Gulf of Finland basin in the 15-20th centuries on the base of Russian historical sources’ Fisheries Research, 87 (2-3), Nov 2007.
	Ojaveer, H., Awebro, K., Karlsdottir, H. MacKenzie, B. ‘Swedish Baltic Sea fisheries during c. 1870-1913: spatio-temporal dynamics of catch and fishing effort’ Fisheries Research, 87 (2-3), Nov 2007.