Integrating Quaternary science research in land management, restoration, and conservation

Most of us have come to expect that the general public will ignore the primary message of Quaternary science that change happens. A flurry, however, of recent media attention to 20th-century global warming and its anomalies from climates of the last millennium has brought climate science at least momentarily into popular focus. Similarly, public land-managing agencies and conservation groups have begun, under the rubric of ecosystem management, to incorporate concepts of historic variability into landscape analysis, ecological monitoring, population-viability assessment, and ecological restoration. While these are important turns, and credit the influence of Quaternary science, an increasing challenge for our community is to ensure that information is understood and used accurately. With the door to thinking about the past swung open, some odd concepts and misinterpretations have blown in – many of these are being codified in difficult-to-change policy, practice, and thinking (Millar and Woolfenden, 1999a).