Ecological Change, Sliding Baselines and the Importance of Historical Data: Lessons from Combing Observational and Quantitative Data on a Temperate Reef Over 70 Years
Fig 3
Data sources and historical analyses.
a) Number of papers (each quadrat is one document) per decade on the coralligenous assemblages of Mesco Reef, according to the year of publication.
Grey quadrats represent descriptive ‘natural history’ reports (including species lists and/or environmental information); black quadrats represent studies based on quantitative (cover) data. b) Change with time in the occurrence of a number of selected species mentioned in both qualitative and quantitative studies on the coralligenous assemblages of Mesco Reef. In the lower panel, continuous lines indicate the presumed persistence of a species, with thicker lines representing an increase in abundance or frequency and thinner lines a decrease, as perceived by the different authors. In the upper panel, diamonds represent the cumulative numbers of perceived changes, while the smoothed line indicates the general trend with time.