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Background: We are witnessing increasing demand from governments and society for all sciences to have relevant social impact and to show the returns they provide to society. Aims and objectives: This paper reports strategies that promote social impact by Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) research projects. Methods: An in-depth analysis of six Social Sciences and Humanities research projects that achieved social impact was carried out to identify those strategies. For each case study, project documents were analysed and qualitative fieldwork was conducted with diverse agents, including researchers, stakeholders and end-users, with a communicative orientation. Findings: The strategies that were identified as contributing to achieving social impact include a clear focus of the project on social impact and the definition of an active strategy for achieving it; a meaningful involvement of stakeholders and end-users throughout the project lifespan, including local organisations, underprivileged end-users, and policy makers who not only are recipients of knowledge generated by the research projects but participate in the co-creation of knowledge; coordination between projects' and stakeholders' activities; and dissemination activities that show useful evidence and are oriented toward creating space for public deliberation with a diverse public. Discussion and conclusions: The strategies identified can enhance the social impact of Social Sciences and Humanities research. Furthermore, gathering related data, such as collaboration with stakeholders, use of projects' findings and the effects of their implementation, could allow researchers to track the social impact of the projects and enhance the evaluation of research impact.

Policies aiming to restore ecosystems, achieve thriving fisheries and reverse biodiversity loss require knowledge of their former status and long‐term variation. As quantitative fish data is typically only available for recent decades long after changes may have occurred, a greater use of qualitative sources has been encouraged in marine historical ecology. We examined diverse historical information (including maritime history, fisheries reports, naturalists' accounts, recipes, nautical charts and newspapers) across a multi‐century time span (13th–20th century) for a wide range of species to document their long‐term trajectories in an understudied Northeast Atlantic ecosystem (Irish Sea coast of Wales). We find strong evidence of the loss of both a pelagic fishery for herring, which was of fundamental socio‐ecological importance since at least the 13th century, and the loss of significant multi‐species demersal and intertidal fisheries. Local, commercial and/or functional extinction has occurred for taxa spanning a wide range of diversity (crustacean, elasmobranchs, sturgeon, and teleosts), body size and ecological role, suggesting far‐reaching changes to food webs. This raises fundamental questions about the present‐day health and integrity of this coastal ecosystem and the long‐term viability of current fisheries which depend on a few shellfish species. Our century‐scale synthesis of qualitative data for multiple taxa allows the collective breadth of losses to be fully appreciated and may reduce the risk of 'shifting baselines'. Restoration to historical baselines may not be achievable, but our findings provide evidence of long‐term change relevant to policies for recovery, and prevention of further decline of fishes, fisheries and ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The North Sea region boasted one of the world's most important fisheries for many centuries. Climate directly and indirectly influences the development and survival of many important pelagic fish in the North Sea ecosystem. One indirect influence is the food availability in the form of phyto- and zooplankton abundance, which is strongly controlled by environmental factors. One of these environmental factors is local sea surface temperatures. A negative correlation between zooplankton abundance and sea surface temperature is well established for the epeiric sea on the European continental shelf. Continuous temporal observations of North Sea zooplankton production only exist since 1958. Therefore we developed a Historical Plankton Index (HPI) from 800 CE onwards to extend our record of temperature-driven zooplankton abundance in the North Sea over a multi-centennial time scale. For this we used the North Atlantic temperature reconstructions and associations between zooplankton abundance and contemporary sea surface temperatures established applying a General Additive Modelling (GAM) approach. We then examined the association between the HPI and historical landings from the Dutch commercial herring fishery in the 17th century to test the utility of our HPI. We examine the potential influence of food availability (in terms of zooplankton abundance) on the fishery, the evolution of which is often only considered in terms of human influences such as conflict, fishing gear and demand for fish as a commodity. We find that under certain conditions the HPI can explain 20% of the variability in Dutch herring landings. This highlights the importance of developing long-term and large-scale indices of natural marine ecosystem dynamics to understand the historical fortunes of the commercial fishing industry. The results are directly relevant to the United Nations' sustainable development goal 14 – life below water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the need to contribute to the evaluation of the scientific, social, and political impact of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) research has become a demand of policy makers and society. The international scientific community has made significant advances that have transformed the impact of evaluation landscape. This article reviews the existing scientific knowledge on evaluation tools and techniques that are applied to assess the scientific impact of SSH research; the changing structure of social and political impacts of SSH research is investigated based on an overarching research question: to what extent do scholars attempt to apply methods, instruments, and approaches that take into account the distinctive features of SSH? The review also includes examples of European Union (EU) projects that demonstrate these impacts. This article culminates in a discussion of the development of the assessment of different impacts and identifies limitations, and areas and topics to explore in the future.

We propose the concept of the "Fish Revolution" to demarcate the dramatic increase in North Atlantic fisheries after AD 1500, which led to a 15-fold increase of cod (Gadus morhua) catch volumes and likely a tripling of fish protein to the European market. We consider three key questions: (1) What were the environmental parameters of the Fish Revolution? (2) What were the globalising effects of the Fish Revolution? (3) What were the consequences of the Fish Revolution for fishing communities? While these questions would have been considered unknowable a decade or two ago, methodological developments in marine environmental history and historical ecology have moved information about both supply and demand into the realm of the discernible. Although much research remains to be done, we conclude that this was a major event in the history of resource extraction from the sea, mediated by forces of climate change and globalisation, and is likely to provide a fruitful agenda for future multidisciplinary research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose the concept of Accelerated Marine Extraction to signify two periods when rapidly increasing cod (Gadus morhua, Gadidae) and herring (Clupea harengus, Clupeidae) fisheries, c.1540–1600 and c. 1730–1790, exceeded human demographic growth. Total landings vastly exceeded previous assessments and more than doubled between 1520 and 1620 from about 220,000 metric tonnes (t) to 460,000 t. Supplies of cod and herring to the European market peaked in 1788 at more than 1 million t before the unrest connected with the French Revolution brought many fisheries to a temporary halt. Accelerated Marine Extractions increased European food security at times of human demographic growth by almost doubling the supplies of fish protein per capita. While herring was the most important species by 1520, cod dominated through the period 1540–1790, and the trajectories of cod and herring extractions differed significantly. Cod landings increased almost ten‐fold between 1520 and 1790, driven by strong and sustained landings in the Northwest Atlantic. Herring landings remained stable through the 16th century but declined severely through the next 150 years. However, from 1750, herring landings quadrupled, largely because of Swedish west coast fisheries. The results fundamentally shift our understanding of the scale of Atlantic fisheries in the past and underline the role of marine resources for European societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schijns et al. use a historical time series to inform a stock assessment model for the northern Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) fishery from 1508 to 2019. They find that catches from the sixteenth century to the 1950s did not exceed 200000 t per annum and could have been sustained today "if fishing effort and mortality had been stabilized in the 1980s". Had Schijns et al. used a more complete and representative time series (as identified below), they would have found that catches were substantially higher during much of the time period, possibly affecting their conclusions regarding the timing and onset of unsustainable exploitation. In an earlier paper, based on original archival documentation, we have argued that total landings in the Newfoundland fishery averaged 400000 t in the eighteenth century and peaked at 600000 t in 1788. We contend that pre-industrial technology was sufficient to have a significant impact on marine life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We apply a novel methodology to the study of the Newfoundland cod fisheries in order to determine a reasoned and acceptable chronological value series for total catch amounts in the early modern period where data are scarce. The paper focuses on the two main protagonists in the Newfoundland fisheries arena in that period: France and England. The period 1675–1790 has been selected as a viable and representative chronology for a case study where data, while available in part, are limited and often missing. The new methodology proposed here enables further exploration, input and assessment such that an ever-greater level of accuracy, integrity and robustness may be achieved in future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a feature of the Fish Revolution (1400–1700), the early modern "invention" of the Grand Banks in literary and cartographical documents facilitated a massive and unprecedented extraction of cod from the waters of the north Atlantic and created the Cod/Sack trade Triangle. This overlapped with the southern Atlantic Slave, Sugar, and Tobacco Triangle to capitalise modern European and North American societies. In 1719, Pierre de Charlevoix claimed that the Grand Banks was "properly a mountain, hid under water," and noted its cod population "seems to equal that of the grains of sand which cover this bank." However, two centuries later in 1992, in the face of the collapse of the fishery, and fearing its extinction, a moratorium was placed on five centuries of harvesting Grand Banks cod. The invention and mining of its waters serves as a bellwether for the massive resource extractions of modernity that drive the current leviathan and "wicked problem" of global warming. The digital environmental humanities narrative of this study is parsed together from 83 pieces of Grand Banks charting from 1504 to 1833, which are juxtaposed through Humanities GIS applications with English and French cod‐catch records kept between 1675 and 1831, letters regarding Cabot's 1497 voyage, Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611) and scientific essays by De Brahms (1772) and Franklin (1786). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the turn of the sixteenth century, John Cabot and his successors discovered abundant fish stocks in the north west Atlantic waters near Newfoundland. This article accounts for how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mapping provide another strand of evidence that supplement our knowledge of the subsequent Iberian, French, and British fisheries. Such cartography exhibited significant mutations and innovations in rendering fishing locations, and illustrating fishing practices and fish species. Fishermen's knowledge must have informed such mapping. The innovation of hydrographical indicators in esthetically appealing maps recognized from an early stage the status of the Grand Banks as a globally important feature of submarine topography. More refined and accurate delineations of its submarine plateaus and other adjacent continental shelves closely followed the development of fishing activities, encompassing both Newfoundland's nearshore and the Grand Banks themselves. Furthermore, such cartography reflected transformative and reciprocal relationships with commerce and inter-state politics across the North Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops and utilizes novel methods that combine historical records concerning the diets of European naval mariners in the sixteenth century with modern information on the nutritional content of food. Energy, vitamin, and mineral intakes were compared to modern recommended values. Calorie provisions were sufficient and relatively constant in all Western European fleets. The absence of vitamin C was a universal failure of the naval diet. The limiting factor to variety and balance in the naval diet was the demands of preservation with limited technology. Fish declined in importance between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries while beef increased in importance. A database structure that allows for calculation of nutritional information was designed and utilized in this research and is provided online for future reference and calculation of diets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the need to contribute to the evaluation of the scientific, social, and political impact of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) research has become a demand of policy makers and society. The international scientific community has made significant advances that have transformed the impact of evaluation landscape. This article reviews the existing scientific knowledge on evaluation tools and techniques that are applied to assess the scientific impact of SSH research; the changing structure of social and political impacts of SSH research is investigated based on an overarching research question: to what extent do scholars attempt to apply methods, instruments, and approaches that take into account the distinctive features of SSH? The review also includes examples of European Union (EU) projects that demonstrate these impacts. This article culminates in a discussion of the development of the assessment of different impacts and identifies limitations, and areas and topics to explore in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce the Humanities for the Environment (HfE) 2018 Report. The HfE 2018 Report consists of two publications; of which this Special Issue is one. The other is a special section of the journal Global and Planetary Change 156 (2017); 112-175. While the Humanities special issue may primarily reach our colleagues in the humanities disciplines; the Global and Planetary Change section reaches out to that journal's primary readership of earth scientists. The HfE 2018 Report provides examples of how humanities research reveals and influences human capacity to perceive and cope with environmental change. We hope that the HFE 2018 Report will help change perceptions of what it is we do as humanities scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Felix Riede's claim that knowing about deep pasts will help knowing about deep futures. It highlights the archaeology needs to develop a pro-environmental dialogue through museums and public media and to be aware of the environmental humanities and climate change. Information on Neolithic archaeology reaching into times that are closed to other humanities disciplines is given.