My research is shaped by a strong interest in past, present and potential future human impacts on marine species and ecosystems. Human activities such as fishing and hunting, habitat alteration, and nutrient loading have influenced marine ecosystems for millennia, but strongly accelerated over time and expanded from inshore to open ocean regions. In my work, I try to reconstruct the long-term history of human-induced changes in marine species and ecosystems, to disentangle the cumulative effects of multiple human activities, and to analyze the consequences of changes on the structure and functioning of ocean ecosystems. I use a multi-disciplinary approach, integrating data from palaeontology, archaeology, history, fisheries science, and ecology, and a combination of field and laboratory experiments and surveys, literature studies, the analysis of large data sets and ecological modeling.