Three work packages were progressed during the project.
Work Package 1 aimed to develop methods to use historical and long-term datasets to reconstruct marine and coastal ecosystem service dynamics.
Work Package 2 aimed to discover key social and ecological factors and their interactions that lead to ecosystem service production over time.
Work Package 3 aimed to identify past and present ecosystem service values and quantify changes over time among user groups.
Research is still underway for specific work packages, with manuscripts in preparation. To date, three related peer-reviewed papers have been published. Published results highlight the wide variety of services provided through time by coastal marine ecosystems such as oyster reefs, and the transformation in particular services as habitats became degraded, or as groups of people became marginalized from their traditional practices. Research also demonstrates the variance in ecosystem services provided across bivalve marine species and habitats. Research currently underway highlights the strong regional identities fostered as the result of provisioning practices for particular marine species (e.g. the flat oyster), and demonstrates some of the interactions across different types of ecosystem services (Thurstan et al. In prep). Interviews with stakeholders (delayed due to Covid restrictions with research still underway) highlights the many conceptual challenges around cultural ecosystem services which lead to further challenges when attempting to value these services, but it also demonstrates the ways in which interviewees define multiple marine cultural services and their interconnections.
Early results were disseminated via oral presentations and project outputs were worked on with collaborators at three international working groups: International Council for Exploration of the Sea Working Group on the History of Fish and Fisheries 2019 and 2020, Native Oyster Restoration Alliance Historical Ecology Working Group 2020; two international conferences: Oceans Past 2018, Oceans Past 2020; and two international visits where I presented an extended seminar on my research: Boston University (USA) and Murdoch University (Australia).
