Conservation of marine ecosystems aims to maint...conservation of marine ecosystems aims to maintain or restore sites to a more natural, pristine state. however, one of the challenges in setting conservation goals is determining precisely what constitutes a pristine state. human activity has far-reaching consequences, and even remote locations in the present day have experienced some form of human impact, such as fishing, pollution, ocean warming or acidification. the present-day reference for “pristine” may therefore be very different from an ecosystem that has never truly suffered the influence of humans. in order to better determine criteria for healthy ecosystems, and to understand how ecosystems have been modified over time, information regarding temporal change in marine communities is needed. historical ecology is a new approach, which utilizes information from non-traditional sources, such as historical records, pictures, registers and interviews in order to reconstruct information about past environments. this approach is becoming more widely used as a new source of information for studying ecosystem change (kittinger et al., 2014; mcclenachan 2009). in this study, we propose to use historical data, including the first underwater photographs taken in brazil, to better understand temporal changes in marine communities along the coast of brazil.