Ancient environmental DNA indicates limited human impact on marine biodiversity in pre-industrial Iceland

Human activities are affecting marine biodiversity globally by accelerating extinction rates, altering ecosystem conditions and changing community structures. These changes can only be understood through establishing the ecosystem state prior to significant anthropogenic impact and by disentangling the anthropogenic effect from natural climatic changes. Here, we reconstruct marine biodiversity in Iceland across three millennia (1315 BCE–1785 CE), encompassing periods of climatic fluctuation and human settlement, to explore the comparative effect of natural and anthropogenic forces on marine biodiversity. We performed 18S metabarcoding of ancient environmental DNA from two sediment cores collected from northern Icelandic shelf seas, integrating local climatic records, population estimates and zooarchaeological remains from published sources to estimate the influence of climatic and anthropogenic impacts. Against the backdrop of increasing human populations and marine exploitation, we observe no large-scale taxonomic shifts or anthropogenic biodiversity changes across the period. In contrast, we found a positive correlation between herring ( Clupea harengus ) detection rates and proxy-reconstructed sea surface temperature, suggesting a role for climate in shaping marine biodiversity. Overall, our data suggest that despite impacts on terrestrial ecosystems and the development of a substantial export fishery across the study period, Icelandic society may have had a limited effect on marine biodiversity. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Shifting seas: understanding deep-time human impacts on marine ecosystems’.