ABSTRACT
The chapters that comprise this volume were originally presented as papers to an international conference – Oceans Past: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the History of Marine Animal Populations – held in Kolding, Denmark, in October 2005. This meeting was convened by the History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP) project, which forms the historical component of a global network of researchers engaged in the Census of Marine Life (CoML), a ten-year initiative designed to assess and explain the diversity, distribution and abundance of marine life in the oceans – past, present and future (see the Foreword). The principal aim of the conference was to bring together researchers from the natural sciences and the humanities to discuss how and why marine life in the world’s oceans has changed over time, and the role that humans have played in that dynamic process. Such an ambitious remit permitted those engaged in HMAP to take stock of the headway their project had made since its launch in 2001, as well as sharing their findings with the scientific community at large.
