Keywords

1 Introduction

The state of a landscape is the product of current and past environmental factors, including climatic, biotic and anthropogenic factors. Growing anthropogenic impacts on the climate and the biosphere has brought into focus the dynamic nature of our planet and highlighted the need to understand long-term climate and ecological processes, both retrospectively in terms of historical patterns and processes, and as a basis for informing future projections (Willis et al. 2010). Under current climate change scenarios, environmental systems are expected to undergo adaptive responses leading to novel ecosystems with no modern analogue (Lovejoy 2007; Williams and Jackson 2007). Long-term ecological observatories, monitoring programs and advancements in remote sensing techniques have allowed for ecosystem dynamics to be mapped and monitored at a large spatial scale; however, these are temporally restricted to the last few decades. Among other applications, long-term datasets form the basis for model building and validation for future climate projections. For more recently established observatories, it is impractical to wait for decades to generate long-term monitoring data (Rull 2014). Given the limited temporal range of historical data, alternative approaches are required to gain insight as to how climates and ecosystems operate over ecologically meaningful timescales.

To provide a deeper understanding of environmental variability over longer timescales, researchers have turned to natural archives of environmental change, such as marine, lake and wetland sediments. These archives offer an indirect record of ecological variability, and the underlying mechanisms influencing ecosystem change (Jackson and Hobbs 2009). For instance, through the identification of fossil pollen preserved in sedimentary archives, paleoresearch attempts to reconstruct past vegetation composition. This is achieved by transferring a species, environmental envelope from the extant ecosystem processes within which it occurs to the fossilized occurrences within the paleorecord (Williams and Jackson 2007; Willis et al. 2010). This approach offers a window into environmental change over the course of deposition and contributes to understanding environmental factors such as climate and hydrology, and biological factors such as species niche parameters and geographical range (Seddon et al. 2014). In many cases, baseline conditions are perceived to be those which occurred prior to intensive human involvement and modification. Yet, ecosystems are anything but static in nature, but rather dynamic with a range of natural variability (Froyd and Willis 2008). Fundamentally, systems are in continual flux, responding to external forces within a defined boundary range and baselines can shift depending on the timescale of observation. This is a key consideration when developing a management strategy and identifying ecologically realistic management targets (Forbes et al. 2018). Here, paleoenvironmental research can present unique insights in determining a system’s threshold and resilience to change by revealing former multiple interacting processes (Willis et al. 2010; Gillson and Marchant 2014; Gillson 2015).

Paleoecology as a discipline has progressed from a largely qualitative base typified by the descriptive reconstruction of past environments to a considerably more quantitative science. This is mainly due to statistical innovations that have allowed for cross-validation of sites and proxies and the detection of regime shifts and tipping points (e.g., Line et al. 1994; Birks et al. 2012; Seddon et al. 2014; Blaauw et al. 2020). This, coupled with the development of more robust chronologies (see Blaauw et al. 2007; Bronk Ramsey 2008; Aquino-López et al. 2018) has provided direct correlations between sites, ultimately creating a regional perspective. The application and perceived relevance of the research outputs from quantitative, temporally constrained environmental reconstructions has increased. For example, paleoclimatic data now forms a critical component of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Physical Science basis (IPCC 2021), and the reassessment of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, on an individual site basis, to include paleoenvironmental insights into the natural ecological character of wetland systems for better management practices (Finlayson et al. 2016; Gell et al. 2016; Gell 2017). Paleoenvironmental perspectives also increase our understanding of climate versus human-driven fire regimes, through charcoal-based paleofire records, assisting in fire management, conservation and restoration efforts (McWethy et al. 2013; Iglesias et al. 2015; Maezumi et al. 2021).

There have been numerous calls for the closer integration of ecology, ecosystem restoration, conservation biology and paleoecology (e.g., Willis and Birks 2006; Dearing 2008; Froyd and Willis 2008; Willis and Bhagwat 2010; Birks 2012; Gillson and Marchant 2014; Gillson 2015; Davidson et al. 2018) leading to a greater application of paleoenvironmental and paleoecological datasets to answer questions of conservation and management relevance. Yet, concrete applications of paleoecology in conservation and management remain scarce. Rull (2014, p. 2) criticizes this lack of synergy and warns of “delaying the advancement of ecological knowledge and the potential impact of its applications on ... nature conservation and the sustainable use of ecological services.” High resolution, multiproxy paleoenvironmental studies reveal the importance of long-term data in broadening our comprehension of alterations in ecosystem services (ES), ecosystem resilience and variability and incorporating knowledge into ecosystem assessments and management (Dearing et al. 2012b; Gillson 2015; Jeffers et al. 2015). In the South African context, there are numerous Holocene-age paleoecological studies (Table S12.1); however, few adequately demonstrate the impactful application of paleoecological data for land management (Fig. 12.1). Such applied paleoecology is a major development in the field, which is beginning to gain traction in South Africa, working to address the “fundamental disconnect” between the disciplines of ecology and paleoecology (Gillson and Duffin 2007; Forbes et al. 2018).

Fig. 12.1
A map of the South Africa with neighboring countries. Boundaries of Lesotho in southwest and and Eswatini in east are marked. A few small triangles are near the south and northeastern boundary, and several sparse dots are marked throughout.

Spatial distribution of selected Holocene-age paleosites across South Africa, noting those which included applied paleoecological aspects (triangles) (Full details and associated references for these sites are in the Supplementary Material)

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2 Evolution of South African Paleoenvironmental Research

The paleoresearch community in South Africa has emerged from relatively slow beginnings, compounded by a range of region-specific limitations. These include the often cited lack of organic sedimentary archives due to the arid and semiarid climatic setting (Chase and Meadows 2007), and, more generally, a lack of capacity, funding and isolated research environment, at least up until the mid-1990s. There are now several active research groups and organizations across the country, with strong evidence of ongoing international collaboration (e.g., Haberzettl et al. 2014). In recent years, growing interest, and investment, in the story of human evolution has propelled the paleosciences forward, as a means of providing climate and environmental context to the development of early modern humans (Meadows 2015). Through this inherent geographical advantage, South Africa is broadly recognized as a priority research area for the paleosciences and has benefitted from a dedicated national funding instrument, the National Research Foundation African Origins Platform.

Paleoenvironmental research in South Africa has traditionally focused on pollen-based vegetation reconstructions, using wetland sediments, as a means to infer past climatic conditions (e.g., Martin 1956; Coetzee 1967). Innovative strides were taken to combat the effects of dry and strongly seasonal climate, which hampers accumulation of long, continuous sedimentary deposits. Thus, an expansion into a broader range of unconventional archives began (Meadows 2015), including pan sediments (e.g., Scott 1988), cave sediments (e.g., Thackeray 1992), rock hyrax middens (e.g., Scott et al. 2004) and coprolites (e.g., Carrion et al. 2000). Fitchett et al. (2017) noted a rapid increase in both the number of studies published and the number of proxies used in recent years, as researchers moved from a pollen-dominated narrative to include additional physical, chemical and biological proxies (Meadows 2014). In particular, studies employing isotopes (e.g., Smith et al. 2002; Esterhuysen and Smith 2003), geochemistry (e.g., Wündsch et al. 2016, 2018; Strobel et al. 2019) and diatoms (e.g., Kirsten et al. 2018, 2020) have become more prevalent (Fitchett et al. 2017). This shift toward a more multiproxy approach follows international trends, with the use of multiple independent lines of evidence as a means to strengthen interpretations and identify inconsistencies.

Although local paleoenvironmental research has remained largely qualitative, recent shifts toward a more quantitative analytical science have begun. The advent of transfer functions and various modeling approaches to paleodata have provided measurable comparisons to modern ecosystems (Anderson 1995; Birks et al. 2012). The incorporation of paleodata for use in probability density functions (PDF), such as that employed by the software CREST (Chevalier 2021), has assisted in reconstructing several climatic variables, including winter and summer temperature and precipitation, mean annual aridity and rainfall seasonality, by assigning modern climatic envelopes to fossil pollen assemblages across southern Africa (e.g., Chevalier and Chase 2016). Additionally, a transfer function was developed to quantitatively reconstruct relative sea level along the east coast of South Africa through the analysis of the modern elevation preferences of intertidal salt-marsh foraminifera (Strachan et al. 2014, 2015). Such quantitative approaches are underpinned by their modern data coverage, following which a recent move to address this modern data deficit is apparent (see, for example, Sobol et al. 2019; Strobel et al. 2020), still more work is needed in this area. These quantitative applications can deliver a direct source of information to support climate projections, with a scope to further develop southern African training databases to better constrain local predictions.

Nevertheless, the application of paleoenvironmental data implicitly relies on robust and well-constrained chronologies. Early studies developed age models based on linear interpolation of often uncalibrated radiocarbon age determinations; however, age-depth modeling of sediment sequences has developed into a complex, multisample, statistical approach. This transition has assisted in cross-validating environmental trends on a local, regional and global scale. For greater refinement, extensive work was undertaken in determining regional marine reservoir effects for the eastern to southeastern coast (Maboya et al. 2018) and the west coast (Dewar et al. 2012) of South Africa, where previously the marine carbon component was overlooked. Beyond the accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dating methods, the incorporation of chronological markers (Neumann et al. 2011), lead-210 (see Forbes et al. 2018) and even paleomagnetic secular variations (see Haberzettl et al. 2019) have assisted in refining age-depth models. These analytical developments have greatly benefitted the interpretation of data and temporally constrained environmental events from sites across South Africa.

Despite the paleocommunity being active in advancing the field, there are several gaps in the knowledge of the role and application of paleoecology in informing sustainable land-use management, restoration and conservation. By focusing on the last 5000 years, key reference conditions for restoration and conservation efforts can be ascertained due to notable climatic deviations, including the mid-Holocene Altithermal, arrival of pastoralism in southern Africa, Medieval Climate Anomaly, Little Ice Age, European settlement and twentieth century global change drivers. However, even with global efforts heeding the call to put applied paleoecology into practice, there is limited implementation, bar a few studies (e.g., Forbes et al. 2018; Cramer et al. 2019; MacPherson et al. 2019; Dirk and Gillson 2020; Gillson et al. 2020; Dabengwa et al. 2021) (Fig. 12.1).

3 Shifting Mindsets: The Combination of Paleoecology and Restoration Ecology

Defining restoration and management targets requires a nuanced understanding of landscape history and an acknowledgement that variability and disturbance are normal. For example, an increase in tree cover in savannas might be considered undesirable if it is caused by the unprecedented disruptions of the twentieth century, including CO2 enrichment and fire suppression, but might be considered tolerable or advantageous, if representing a return to former tree cover following land abandonment (Fig. 12.2). Furthermore, in the late twentieth century, ecological paradigms shifted, with the recognition that change rather than balance was the norm for most ecosystems (Pickett et al. 1997). Early conservation tactics aimed at preventing change, such as fire suppression and culling of animals, largely failed to stabilize ecosystems and ecologists realized that a new ecology of flux was needed (Gillson 2015).

Fig. 12.2
4 graphs of woody plant density versus time between recent past, start of historical observations, and till present. a. stable, and rise from the start of observations. b. drop, stable, and rise from the start of observations. c. similar to b with an early increase. d. Triangle waveform.

Hypothetical graphs indicating observed increase in woody vegetation cover in the recent past (solid line) and different possible late Holocene landscape histories (dotted lines) (a) the recent increase in tree cover is unprecedented within the timeframe examined (b) the recent increase represents an recovery from past woody vegetation clearance (c) the recent increase represents an recovery from past woody vegetation clearance, but woody cover is now higher than it was before clearance (d) woody vegetation cover varies cyclically over time

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In restoration ecology, managers aim to restore a degraded ecosystem whose structure, composition and function has been compromised, usually as a result of anthropogenic factors, for example deforestation, agriculture, urbanization, pollution or the invasion of nonnative species (Falk 2017). To define restoration goals, a reference condition is needed. In the case of a once-off disturbance event, the reference condition can be the state of the ecosystem prior to the disturbance, or the state of a neighboring ecosystem that has not experienced the disturbance. However, in most cases, defining reference conditions is much more complicated. Disturbance and variability are normal in most ecosystems; climate and fire regime changes over time can be an integral process in system functionality and many landscapes have been managed by people for centuries or even millennia. These factors leave a lasting legacy on landscapes that must be considered in restoration plans (Higgs et al. 2014; Johnstone et al. 2016; Manzano et al. 2020). What then should be the reference conditions that inform restoration management?

In Sub-Saharan Africa, there is a case to be made that at least 500 years of paleoecological data are needed to define an appropriate range of variability, this captures the status of ecosystems and social-ecological systems prior to European settlement, and well before the onset of postindustrial anthropogenic climate change (Gillson and Marchant 2014; Gillson 2015). Data from fossil pollen, together with historical documents and archeological records, can be used to reconstruct the influence of anthropogenic and environmental change on vegetation cover and form a basis for informing restoration of degraded landscapes. These data can also be useful in restoring traditional management techniques, such as patch mosaic burning and transhumant grazing, that are well-adapted to the variable environments that are typical of African rangelands (Laris 2002).

Fig. 12.3
4 photographs. a and b. Grassland with a few trees lining the back and small mountain range behind. c and d. A mountain with trees on its slope. b and d have more trees than in a and c.

Repeat photographs showing increases in woody vegetation in the savanna biome of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa in recent decades. Weenen Nature Reserve in (a) 1955 and (b) 2011. Weenen Middlerest in (c) 1955 and (d) 2011. Original photos: D. Edwards (1955) © South African National Biodiversity Institute. Repeat photos: J. Puttick (2011) © Plant Conservation Unit, UCT. CC BY-NC 4.0. Photos courtesy of Timm Hoffman and rePhotoSA [http://ibali.uct.ac.za/s/rephotosa/] (Hoffman and O'Connor 1999)

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Here, savannas are used as an example case study to illustrate the importance of long-term data in defining reference conditions and informing restoration targets. In recent decades, woody vegetation has increased in many savannas (Wigley et al. 2010; O’Connor et al. 2014; Hoffman et al. 2019) (Fig. 12.3), with several factors interacting to determine tree density. Tree abundance varies in response to climate (especially rainfall), fire, herbivory, soil nutrients and CO2 (Bond and Midgley 2012). Furthermore, savannas are important rangelands and humans have manipulated both fire and herbivory to sustain grazing for domestic animals and retain a diverse array of ES. This manipulation of savannas through fire and herbivory was disrupted due to the eighteenth-century European colonization and settlement. Hunting of elephants for ivory and extermination of predators, for example, would have affected herbivory and therefore tree recruitment and vegetation structure (Hempson et al. 2015; Venter et al. 2017). In the late nineteenth century, Rinderpest wiped out significant proportions of herbivores, probably driving pulses of tree and shrub recruitment and leading to unusually high tree densities (Ofcansky 1981; Holdo et al. 2009). In addition, many colonial governments instigated policies of fire suppression and later prescribed burning that disrupted natural fire regimes and traditional patterns of fire management, again facilitating tree growth (van Wilgen et al. 2014; Humphrey et al. 2020).

Such fire management policies were often continued beyond independence and in many cases are only recently being reviewed. At the same time, rising levels of CO2 further enhanced tree recruitment (Scheiter and Higgins 2012), while land-use and settlement patterns changed, with increasing sedentarization of previously transhumant populations. With increasing urbanization and government grants, destocking of formerly heavily grazed areas has occurred in recent decades (Blair et al. 2018). Many savannas were unusually heavily wooded by the opening of the twentieth century, due to the unusual and rapidly changing conditions of the past two centuries. Therefore, when many national parks were founded in the early decades of the twentieth century, they were likely in a state of atypically high tree density compared with preceding centuries and millennia. Using protected areas as reference conditions for other, more heavily degraded areas is therefore often inappropriate and highlights the potential role of paleoecology in establishing reference conditions for savanna restoration.

Where paleoecology shows that tree abundance is unprecedented or outside of the historical range of variability (Fig. 12.3a and c), appropriate restoration might include attempts to reduce tree cover, for example through larger herbivore populations or more intense burns. Such interventions might be deemed unnecessary, where tree cover is recovering from past clearance or undergoing cyclical change (Fig. 12.3b and d). With so many variables at play, it is not surprising that the structure of savannas is highly variable over both space and time. Therefore, the appropriate response to increasing woody cover depends on understanding the history of the landscape, requiring long-term data that extends beyond the timescale of intensive human impact in the past few centuries (Gillson and Marchant 2014; Gillson 2015).

Sediment cores retrieved from the Kruger National Park, and spanning the last 5000 years, assisted in identifying a series of alternate stable states in savanna vegetation, from studying interactions between local hydrology, climate, fire and herbivory (Gillson and Ekblom 2009, 2020; Ekblom and Gillson 2010). These states are largely determined by the interplay between rainfall and fire, but transitions between states can be facilitated or discouraged by management actions that alter herbivory and fire. In this way, the impacts of global change, can be ameliorated at least to some extent by management actions at landscape scales (Midgley and Bond 2015). Fossil pollen data assisted managers and ecologists in the Kruger National Park in developing suites of monitoring endpoints, known as Thresholds of Potential Concern (TPCs) (Rogers 2003; Gillson and Duffin 2007). These thresholds define upper and lower limits of acceptable change in key environmental parameters, for example tree cover. When the measured parameters approach the thresholds, management interventions are triggered that bring the variable back into the accepted range of variability, or alternatively the TPC is re-evaluated. Managers chose limits of variability to tree cover, which if crossed would trigger management responses such as relocation of elephants or changes in fire management (Gillson and Duffin 2007; van Wilgen and Biggs 2011; Gillson 2015). Thus, long-term records can assist in defining the historical range of variability and identifying ecological thresholds, which are significant in restoration and ecosystem management due to their impacts on ecological process and biodiversity. The application of these insights into past variability can assist in the management and restoration of terrestrial ecosystems by determining whether to control increases in woody plants (scenarios a and b in Fig. 12.2) or where paleoecology shows ancient open grassland or heathland systems.

Paleoecology can similarly be used to describe the “natural ecological character” of ecosystems (Finlayson et al. 2005; Gell et al. 2013, 2018; Davidson 2016; Gell 2017), a requirement under the Ramsar Convention which was ratified in 1971. An example from the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB), Australia, shows how a lack of long-term data can lead to incorrect assumptions about “baselines” leading to the perpetuation of degraded states (Finlayson et al. 2017). Decadal–centennial timescales allowed the previous centuries of human impact to be understood, providing a more realistic target for wetland restoration and management of the surrounding landscape policies. Long-term data contextualizing recent vegetation changes and insight into the history of landscapes, environmental change and land use is particularly vital at the current time, an example would be management pressure to afforest open landscapes that are perceived as degraded or denuded forests (Bond et al. 2019). In fact, many open landscapes such as savannas, grasslands and heathlands are valuable in terms of biodiversity and ES. Therefore, it is essential that ancient ecosystems are distinguished from degraded systems if misguided restoration plans on ancient open and biodiverse ecosystems are to be avoided. As shown in the examples of the Kruger National Park and Murray-Darling Basin, this can only be achieved if the history of landscapes is properly understood.

4 A Look into the Future: Applied Paleoecology

With the increase and advancements of paleostudies within South Africa, much can be done to operationalize and mainstream paleoecology for sustainable development in the region. Recent applied paleoecological studies seek to combine methodologies and promote interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary (TD) research, thus encouraging a past-present-future continuum (Dawson et al. 2011; Birks 2012; Gillson and Marchant 2014; Marchant and Lane 2014; Gillson 2015) to frame methodological approaches. This continuum is multifaceted, encompassing a wide variety of methodologies that must be taken into account at a past, present and future level to ensure a comprehensive research approach (Table 12.1).

Table 12.1 Examples of mixed methods that can be used to explore the past–present–future continuum in interdisciplinary and TD research
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4.1 What Operational Approaches Are Needed to Implement Ecosystem-Based Management Actions Based on Applied Paleoecology?

Paleoecology is in a unique position to offer insights into historical variability, thereby providing clues regarding climatic and anthropogenic-induced impacts over time. Policymakers and land managers can use the paleoresults in a strategic way within existing systemic structures at multiple governance scales (Monat and Gannon 2015). Coherence and coordination with governance strategies that focus on ES and human well-being values, stewardship, environment-friendly technology, innovation and investment would therefore be an ideal leverage point for mainstreaming paleoecology into the sustainability development dialogue, which contains both environmental and social dimensions (Dearing 2008; Bond and Morrison-Saunders 2011; Grace 2015; Morrison-Saunders et al. 2015; Díaz et al. 2018; Folke et al. 2021). In this regard, the analysis of multiple paleoproxies can contribute to understanding environmental change at global to local scales, from the interaction between regional biophysical drivers such as climate and fire to changes in vegetation and grazing patterns. However, it is of utmost importance that the (applied) paleoecological community coordinates research efforts to align with governance mechanisms at multiple governance scales.

South Africa’s climate change and biodiversity policy supports and promotes coordinated and cross-sectoral implementation of Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA) (DEA and SANBI 2016; DEFF 2019). EbA is a globally-recognized approach that advocates for a climate change response that also has socio-economic and biodiversity/ecological cobenefits, thus contributing to sustainable development (Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity 2009; Vignola et al. 2009; Pasquini and Cowling 2015; Aronson et al. 2019). Therefore, ecosystem-based approaches are a potential leverage point to incorporate applied paleoecology into land management and decision-making. Paleoresearch should be mainstreamed into governance structures and planning processes (including adaptive management and policy frameworks, e.g., Dearing et al. 2012a, b; Gillson and Marchant 2014), bearing in mind possible contextual factors that would either constrain or enable environmental mainstreaming efforts (Dalal-Clayton and Bass 2009; Bass et al. 2011; Pasquini and Cowling 2015; Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations 2016), and therefore impact the likelihood of sustained resilience and social dynamics on South African landscapes.

Fig. 12.4
An illustration of development of site over time. More Asteraceous shrubland before 1950s, due to high local fires with high herbivory changes to more Renosterbos shrubland between 1959s to present. 3 scenarios in the future include high Asteraceous, high Renosterbos, and with most Renosterbos land.

Conceptual model showing a transition from T1 which is ca. AD 750–1950s to T2 which is ca. AD 1950s to present, and then to a potential future state (T3). Scenarios 1–3 represent potential transitions and the drivers of change associated with them. Herbivory is by livestock between ca. AD 1705–1973 and by reintroduced large indigenous herbivores since AD 1973–present. Scenario 1 shows a reversal to a pre-1950s state. Scenario 2 shows if the current state remains as is. It is hypothesized that, should an environmental threshold be crossed in the future, an alternative stable state of degraded Renosterveld may be attained (Scenario 3). This occurs as the intensity of local fires continues to increase, and the grazing of reintroduced large indigenous herbivores persists

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An interesting interface exists between paleoecology and modeling which further develops the holistic past-present-future continuum and could also improve the utilization of end-products. Despite the scarcity of research that combines long-term paleoecological data with system dynamics (e.g., United Kingdom agro-ecosystem study by McKay et al. 2019), a recent study at a lowland conservation site (Elandsberg Private Nature Reserve) in the Cape Floristic Region of South Africa showed that this can be achieved (Dirk 2021). The study noted the development of the site pre- and post-1950s to present and proposed potential future shifts to one of three alternative stable states (Fig. 12.4). It is indeterminate as to when a forthcoming regime shift will occur and the shift could be due to inappropriate levels of land-use disturbance (fire and overgrazing) and/or climate change. It has been observed that Degraded Renosterveld would consist of more than 60% bare ground, and would be homogenous at the landscape level, with Elytropappus rhinocerotis and alien plant species dominating the area (Forbes et al. 2018). The TD study utilized high temporal resolution, multiproxy paleodata (fossil pollen, spores and charcoal) to infer the alterations of a provisioning Ecosystem Service (plant biodiversity) and two land-use drivers of change (fire and herbivory) to define the historical range of variability. Participatory system dynamics—including a multistakeholder engagement workshop and semistructured interviews with commercial farmers, conservation practitioners and government officials—was used to unravel the temporal complexity of the area. This approach was used to identify feedbacks in the dynamic SES structure and analyze potential scenarios in response to grazing and fire policy, management practices and climate change. The end-product included a simulation model interface (Story Interface in Stella ® Architect, 2019. Isee Systems Inc.), which facilitates engagement with interactive paleodata visualizations enabled by the system dynamics model. The end-product could then be used as a participatory tool or boundary object (Star and Griesemer 1989; Fischer and Riechers 2019) to encourage dialogue regarding unexpected simulation results and future scenarios to provide information to aid in land-use management and the promotion of resilience in the region.

When amalgamating techniques from a variety of disciplines, it is imperative to prioritize the politics and social dynamics associated with not only the formation of knowledge, but also its application outside of academia (Roux et al. 2017; Biermann et al. 2020). To achieve sustainable ecosystem management, the manner in which data is obtained and utilized should incorporate stakeholder participation and mutual learning (Knight et al. 2008). Moreover, the applied paleoecological Community of Practice (CoP) needs to consider the benefits of reflection, and the compilation and dissemination of insights on how and why we engage with stakeholders. A common practice in climate change development programs is a process of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) to assess desired outcomes and impacts, and capturing lessons learned during project implementation (Spearman 2011; Bours et al. 2014). Such principles of transparency and replicability are equally important in applied research. Applied paleoecology is “reflexive” by nature because it uses techniques to gather data that describes the past and develops insights for the present and future. By harnessing best practices from the reflexive nature of paleoecology, the applied paleoecology CoP should be reflecting and reporting on the operational research processes they employ as innovative approaches and methodologies emerge. Documenting and sharing the novel process steps and methodological adaptations are essential for case-specific, multisector and geographically diverse contexts in southern African is an essential knowledge management practice for advancing this field (e.g., Dirk 2021).

Community buy-in and stakeholder ownership is essential for addressing knowledge gaps, integrating diverse knowledge streams and bringing about meaningful change. Therefore, novel approaches whereby researchers and stakeholders iteratively and collaboratively formulate research questions based on real-world problems, use mixed methods and reflect on the applicable evidence and end-products is the fundamental nature of sustainability science (Kates et al. 2009). In addition to using participatory approaches for multistakeholder collaboration at research conception and implementation, long-term data needs to be relevant and effective for communities that require the information. Thus, (applied) paleoecologists need to assume the duty of disseminating paleooutputs which are converted and presented in accessible formats for all relevant stakeholder groups (be they are from the public, private, or civil society sector). Applied paleoecological outputs packaged into useful management decision-support tools will hopefully empower and motivate land-users to practice biodiversity conservation and use natural resources judiciously (Gelderblom et al. 2003; Jackson et al. 2009).

5 Conclusions

The South African paleocommunity, in collaboration with international partners and funders, has actively sought to understand and decipher past environmental change. Historically, this has often taken on the form of relatively low temporal resolution studies emphasizing environmental reconstruction over a variety of timescales (decadal–centennial–millennial timescales), with the presentation of the generated data often being inaccessible to other disciplines and end-users, due to the specialist format or the lack of dissemination.

However, over the last decade or so, the development of the science has been recognized as a valuable instrument in informing on the natural variability and thresholds of an ecological system. Globally, paleoenvironmental research has transitioned to encompass quantitative approaches including modeling, experimentation and observation to directly inform natural resource management practices.

Thus, to take timely action in a world that is facing global problems (such as climate change, poverty and pandemics such as COVID-19), the paleocommunity together with other stakeholders (as multiactor levers) should consider using a past-present-future continuum. Through this lens, innovation and advancement is propelled with an emphasis on recognizing and initiating points of leverage to incorporate paleoecological understandings of long-term change into numerous institutionalized governance levels.

The inclusion of applied paleoecology by the South African paleocommunity, by actively incorporating reflexivity into their research outcomes and providing opportunities for knowledge sharing, will enable them to tailor their work for effective context-based interventions by other researchers and practitioners. It is recommended that reflexive outputs such as lessons learnt, conceptual frameworks, historical range of variability and limits of acceptable change could be compiled and disseminated in the format of policy briefs, grey literature and shared with other knowledge holders (e.g., restoration ecology) Gillson et al. 2021.

Lastly, the next iteration of paleoecological outputs must take into account the end-user and the practicality of the data to effectively guide sustainable land management through the incorporation of policy-relevant concepts such as ES, ecosystem function and social-ecological systems resilience (Dirk 2021).