- Shifting baseline
Shifting baseline (also known as sliding baseline) is a term used to describe the way significant changes to a system are measured against past
baseline s, which themselves may represent significant changes from the original state of the system.The term was first used by the fisheries scientist
Daniel Pauly in his paper "Anecdotes and the shifting baselinesyndrome of fisheries". [Pauly (1995) ] Pauly developed the term in reference tofisheries management where fisheries scientists sometimes fail to identify the correct "" population size (e.g. how abundant a fish species population was "before" human exploitation) and thus work with a shifted baseline. He describes the way that radically depleted fisheries were evaluated by experts who used the state of the fishery at the start of their careers as the baseline, rather than the fishery in its untouched state. Areas that swarmed with a particular species hundreds of years ago, may have experienced long term decline, but it is the level of decades previously that is considered the appropriate reference point for current populations. In this way large declines in ecosystems or species over long periods of time were, and are, masked. There is a loss ofperception of change that occurs when eachgeneration redefines what is "natural".The concept was further refined and applied to the
ecology ofkelp forests by Paul Dayton ofScripps Institution of Oceanography , who used a slightly different version of the term in his paper, "Sliding baselines, ghosts, and reduced expectations in kelp forests". [Dayton (1998)]The term has become widely used to describe the shift over time in the expectation of what a healthy ecosystem baseline looks like.
Broadened definition
In
2002 ,filmmaker and formermarine biologist Randy Olson broadened the definition of shifting baselines with anop-ed in the "Los Angeles Times ". He explained the relevance of the term to all aspects of change, and the failure to notice change in the world today. He andcoral reef ecologist Jeremy Jackson (ofScripps Institution of Oceanography ) co-founded "The Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project" in2003 to help promote a wider understanding and use of the term in discussions of generalconservation .A
conceptual metaphor for a shifting baseline is the price ofcoffee . A cup of coffee may have only cost a $0.05 in the1950 's, but in the1980 's the cost shifted to $1.00 (ignoringinflation ). The "current" (21st century) coffee prices are based on the 1980s model, rather than the 1950s model. The point of reference moved.ee also
*
Bias of an estimator
*Observer effect Notes
References
* Dayton, Paul (1998) "Sliding baselines, ghosts, and reduced expectations in kelp forests."
* Pauly, Daniel (1995) [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VJ1-40W0T2R-7Y&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=313bda126ec2c8cba56b51a0c83d6e6d "Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries."] Trends in Ecology and Evolution 10(10):430.
* Pauly, Daniel (2001) [http://www.fisheries.ubc.ca/members/dpauly/chaptersInBooksReports/2001/ImportanceHistoricalDimensionPolicyMngtNaturalResourceSystems.pdf "Importance of historical dimension policy management in natural resource systems."] ACP-EU Fisheries Research Report No 8.External links
*http://www.shiftingbaselines.org
*http://www.scienceblogs.com/shiftingbaselines
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