 Understanding these direct—or proximate—interactions is an important step towards sustainable use of marine ecosystems.However, proximate interactions are embedded in a much broader socioeconomic context where, for example, economy through trade and finance, human migration and technological advances, operate and interact at a global scale, influencing proximate relationships.Shifting baselines arise in research on marine ecosystems because changes must be measured against some previous reference point (baseline), which in turn may represent significant changes from an even earlier state of the ecosystem.