People have had a profound influence on Earth's biodiversity for millennia, culminating in Anthropocene environmental degradation and the modern biodiversity crisis. While the scale and extent of people's long‐term influence on Earth's biodiversity in terrestrial and nearshore marine ecosystems are relatively well studied, there are significant questions about the antiquity and evolution of people's influence on pelagic ecosys...

The evolutionary mechanisms generating the tremendous biodiversity of islands have long fascinated evolutionary biologists. Genetic drift and divergent selection are predicted to be strong on islands and both could drive population divergence and speciation. Alternatively, strong genetic drift may preclude adaptation. We conducted a genomic analysis to test the roles of genetic drift and divergent selection in causing genetic...

The search for novel approaches to establishing ecological baselines (reference conditions) is constrained by the fact that most ecological studies span the past few decades, at most, and investigate ecosystems that have been substantially altered by human activities for decades, centuries, or more. Paleobiology, archeology, and history provide historical ecological context for biological conservation, remediation, and restora...