ABSTRACT
Historical ecology draws on a wide range of disciplines to unveil the ancient ecological history of ecosystems and to understand how humans interacted with their environment. Recent advances in next-generation sequencing (NGS) techniques and genomics greatly expand the scope and power of genetic approaches to better characterise present-day biodiversity patterns in communities, to infer the evolutionary history of species and to identify genes associated with adaptive or domestication trait variations. However, these new genomic approaches are not commonly recognised for their contributions to historical ecology. In this chapter, we introduce historical genomics as the use of modern genomics to understand how natural and human-mediated processes jointly influenced the microevolutionary trajectories of populations and present-day patterns of biodiversity. We further illustrate this emergent field that has much to offer to historical ecology by reviewing studies that reveal the evolutionary impact of long-term interactions between human societies, their landscapes and associated plant species.
