Resymé
The early 1900s were important years for newly emerging scientific disciplines that focused on the environment. The development of palaeoecology, culminating in the Swedish naturalist and geologist Lennart von Post’s 1916 lecture in Oslo advocating the use of fossil pollen grains preserved in peatbogs to reconstruct changes in vegetation composition through time, was one example. Another was the emerging narrative in the US on the preservation of wilderness. This culminated in a scientific discipline focused on methods to conserve natural environments through sustainable practices of planned use and renewal. Thus at the same time that the discipline of palaeoecology was gaining first recognition, so too was the discipline of what is now called biodiversity conservation.
This talk will examine the synergies and differences in approaches of these two emerging disciplines to ask how the knowledge of vegetation dynamics overtime and the use of long-term ecological records, has informed biodiversity conservation.