Shifting Baselines

[rmwilliams7]

Shifting baselines to me means that the variability of a population changes every year and that there is no stable baseline for an animals desired population. The environment is always changing and more food could be available for some years or the climate could change etc, all which have an effect on the population size of a species. Therefore it is hard to find a baseline population that we believe we should sustain because of all the variability. With the collapse of Northern Cod the baseline was way too high to begin with. People set a baseline population of huge numbers so everyone thought they could overfish and they would still recover. But this was not the case and we can see the results of what happened. A few ways we can help counteract this idea of eternal shifting baselines is just by doing long term research of populations of species and learn what the trends are, and also how anthropogenic changes do effect them over a long period of time. As well as looking at how a species fits into the ecosystem and food web and see what populations numbers are beneficial to the environment and what numbers are not.

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