As a part of the TCBES Speaker Series, ʻImiloa is hosting a talk by Sara Kahanamoku, PhD, called "Conservation Paleobiology for the Anthropocene" on April 2 at 3:30p in the ʻImiloa planetarium! Sara is an assistant researcher at the Hawaiʻi Sea Grant College Program & Department of Earth Sciences. 

Over the past few centuries, novel human activity has reversed a 50-million-year-long global cooling trend and driven biodiversity losses worldwide. These climate and ecosystem changes began decades to centuries before the advent of long-term monitoring programs – meaning that most of our contemporary records come from systems that have already undergone significant alteration.

This seminar will showcase recent findings from an “invisible timescale” system, the Southern California Borderland Basins, where sediment cores with annual layers preserve a high-resolution fossil record. This record can be directly tied to long-term modern observations to retroactively extend ecosystem monitoring prior to the onset of anthropogenic climate change.

Attend this seminar to explore how lessons from this “invisible timescale” system can be applied more broadly to better understand how to manage ecosystems for long-term resilience in the Anthropocene.