"So how did the biosphere become anthropogenic anyway?” asked an astute audience member at my 2007 AGU presentation (powerpoint).  I had just given a presentation on my work with Navin Ramankutty demonstrating that human populations and their use of land have reshaped most of the terrest... [More]

When did rice change the planet?  Rice is the most important food crop on earth, feeding more than half of all humans.  Most is produced in Asia in the flooded paddy systems that form the core of the most intensively-managed of all ancient agricultural anthromes, the rice villages, where i... [More]

Ecologists are studying the least human parts of the most human ecosystems and the most human parts of the wildest ecosystems while favoring the Temperate zone over the Tropics (Nature News Article by Zoë Corbyn: “Ecologists shun the urban jungle”).  That’s what we&rsqu... [More]

Looking for a new view of an old biosphere?  Now, you can buy a wall-sized version of our first Anthropogenic Biomes map over at Maps.com.  The map includes pictures of different anthromes and is based on the paper “Putting people in the map: Anthropogenic Biomes of the World&rdquo... [More]

Do you feel uneasy?  Maybe your local ecosystem has taken a turn for the worse.  According to ecopsycology, we humans suffer profound discomfort when our habitat feels like it is being degraded.  As discussed in an article in this week’s NY times magazine.  Ecopsychology&nb... [More]

People are everywhere these days, but if you really want to “get away from it all” , the remotest place on Earth, aside from Antarctica, turns out to be Tibet.  This from a New Scientist article (and related blog post) that explores travel times in the global accessibility map we... [More]

Should we conserve nature even if it is not wild?  Humans have transformed 40% of earth’s ice-free land into crop fields, pastures and settlements, and have embedded another 37% within used and populated landscapes (anthromes).  While 23% is still free of people and their... [More]

Here is an open question to the group and readers:Is there a typical human habitat, and if so, what does it look like?More than likely, there is a distribution of different habitat types that humans occupy at a global, regional, and even local levels, but perhaps there are some common patterns. ... [More]