Filling historical data gaps to foster solutions in marine conservation

Ecological data sets rarely extend back more than a few decades, limiting our understanding of environmental change and its drivers. Marine historical ecology has played a critical role in filling these data gaps by illuminating the magnitude and rate of ongoing changes in marine ecosystems. Yet despite a growing body of knowledge, historical insights are rarely explicitly incorporated in mainstream conservation and management efforts. Failing to consider historical change can have major implications for conservation, such as the ratcheting down of expectations of ecosystem quality over time, leading to less ambitious targets for recovery or restoration. We discuss several unconventional sources used by historical ecologists to fill data gaps - including menus, newspaper articles, cookbooks, museum collections, artwork, benthic sediment cores - and novel techniques for their analysis. We specify opportunities for the integration of historical data into conservation and management, and highlight the important role that these data can play in filling conservation data gaps and motivating conservation actions. As historical marine ecology research continues to grow as a multidisciplinary enterprise, great opportunities remain to foster direct linkages to conservation and improve the outlook for marine ecosystems

Prospects for Studies of Stellar Evolution and Stellar Death in the JWST Era

I review the prospects for studies of the advanced evolutionary stages of low-, intermediate- and high-mass stars by the JWST and concurrent facilities, with particular emphasis on how they may help elucidate the dominant contributors to the interstellar dust component of galaxies. Observations extending from the mid-infrared to the submillimeter can help quantify the heavy element and dust species inputs to galaxies from AGB stars. JWST's MIRI mid-infrared instrument will be so sensitive that observations of the dust emission from individual intergalactic AGB stars and planetary nebulae in the Virgo Cluster will be feasible. The Herschel Space Observatory will enable the last largely unexplored spectral region, the far-IR to the submillimeter, to be surveyed for new lines and dust features, while SOFIA will cover the wavelength gap between JWST and Herschel, a spectral region containing important fine structure lines, together with key water-ice and crystalline silicate bands. Spitzer has significantly increased the number of Type II supernovae that have been surveyed for early-epoch dust formation but reliable quantification of the dust contributions from massive star supernovae of Type II, Type Ib and Type Ic to low- and high-redshift galaxies should come from JWST MIRI observations, which will be able to probe a volume over 1000 times larger than Spitzer.Comment: 24 pages, 19 figures. To appear in `Astrophysics in the Next Decade: JWST and Concurrent Facilities' (JWST Conference Proceedings), edited by H. A. Thronson, M. Stiavelli and A. G. G. M. Tielens; Springer Series: Astrophysics and Space Science Proceeding