Erle C Ellis

University of Maryland, Baltimore County | UMBC · Department of Geography and Environmental Systems

Over the past 50years, China’s ancient agricultural village landscapes have been transformed by unprecedented social, technological, and ecological changes. Although these dense anthropogenic mosaics of croplands, settlements, and other used lands cover more than 2million square kilometers across China, the nature of these changes and their environ...

We live in the Anthropocene: For better or for worse, the Earth system now functions in ways unpredictable without understanding how human systems function and how they interact with and control Earth system processes. Regardless of whether this transition from the Holocene (generally thought of as the past 12,000 years) to the new epoch of the Ant...

Humans, unlike any other multicellular species in Earth’s history, have emerged as a global force that is transforming the ecology of an entire planet. It is no longer possible to understand, predict, or successfully manage ecological pattern, process or change without understanding why and how humans reshape these over the long-term. Here, a gener...

To conserve the bulk of Earth’s ecological heritage across the Anthropocene, setting aside half of Earth’s land is just a start. To conserve biodiversity over the long term across an increasingly human planet, conservation must become as integral to the human enterprise around the world as are social and economic development.

Human use of land has been transforming Earth's ecology for millennia. From hunting and foraging to burning the land to farming to industrial agriculture, increasingly intensive human use of land has reshaped global patterns of biodiversity, ecosystems, landscapes, and climate. This review examines recent evidence from archaeology, paleoecology, en...

A pair of authors advocate scaling governance structures to better address planetary crises

A data scientist offers an optimistic reality check for the Anthropocene

Since 2015, the Ecomodernist Manifesto has inspired efforts to shape a better future for people and the rest of life in the Anthropocene. At the same time, misconceptions and misunderstandings have arisen about what ecomodernism stands for. As three authors of the Manifesto, we offer this clarifying perspective.

Anthropogenic planetary disruptions, from climate change to biodiversity loss, are unprecedented challenges for human societies. Some societies, social groups, cultural practices, technologies and institutions are already disintegrating or disappearing as a result. However, this coupling of socially produced environmental challenges with disruptive...

As anthropogenic transformation of Earth's ecology accelerates, and its impacts on the sustainability of humanity and the rest of nature become more obvious, geographers and other researchers are leveraging an abundance of spatial data to map how industrialization is transforming the biosphere. This review examines the methodologies used to create...

One mechanism proposed to explain high species diversity in tropical systems is strong negative conspecific density dependence (CDD), which reduces recruitment of juveniles in proximity to conspecific adult plants. Although evidence shows that plant-specific soil pathogens can drive negative CDD, trees also form key mutualisms with mycorrhizal fung...

Current debate on the status and character of the Anthropocene is focussed on whether this interval of geological time should be designated as a formal unit of epoch/series rank in the International Chronostratigraphic Chart/Geological Time Scale, or whether it is more appropriate for it to be considered as an informal ‘event’ comparable in signifi...

A pair of historians dig into the deep ideological roots of our planetary predicament.

Intensive agricultural landscapes pose a challenge to wildlife managers, policymakers, and landowners hoping to increase the diversity of desired wildlife species, such as grassland birds, which require urgent conservation action. In intensive agricultural landscapes, like those of the Midwestern United States, most land area is privately owned and...

Protected areas (PAs) are essential for biodiversity conservation but are threatened by cropland expansion. Recent studies have only reported global cropland expansion in large PAs between 1990 and 2005. However, the amount of cropland expansion in global PAs (including relatively small PAs) since the 2000s is unclear. Using 30-m cropland maps, we...

Synthesis research in ecology and environmental science improves understanding, advances theory, identifies research priorities, and supports management strategies by linking data, ideas, and tools. Accelerating environmental challenges increases the need to focus synthesis science on the most pressing questions. To leverage input from the broader...

Anthromes, or anthropogenic biomes, characterize the globally significant ecological patterns shaped by sustained direct human interactions with ecosystems, including agriculture, urbanization, and other land uses. The emergence of anthromes has literally paved the way for the Anthropocene, and now cover more than three quarters of Earth’s ice-free...

Recognizing two decades of failure to achieve global goals and targets, parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity are in the final phase of negotiating a Post‐2020 Global Biodiversity Framework for the conservation, sustainable use and benefit sharing of biodiversity. The framework attempts to set out pathways, goals and targets for the nex...

Can the Anthropocene be defined as a chronostratigraphic series with its corresponding Anthropocene epoch as a formal entry on the Geological Time Scale? Since 2009, the Anthropocene Working Group (of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy of the International Commission on Stratigraphy of the International Union of Geological Sciences) has a...

Extreme events, such as those caused by climate change, economic or geopolitical shocks, and pest or disease epidemics, threaten global food security. The complexity of causation, as well as the myriad ways that an event, or a sequence of events, creates cascading and systemic impacts, poses significant challenges to food systems research and polic...

An interdisciplinary interrogation of the Anthropocene misses the chance to probe broader and deeper.

Over the course of the last decade the concept of the Anthropocene has become widely established within and beyond the geoscientific literature but its boundaries remain undefined. Formal definition of the Anthropocene as a chronostratigraphical series and geochronological epoch following the Holocene, at a fixed horizon and with a precise global s...

Land use is central to addressing sustainability issues, including biodiversity conservation, climate change, food security, poverty alleviation, and sustainable energy. In this paper, we synthesize knowledge accumulated in land system science, the integrated study of terrestrial social-ecological systems, into 10 hard truths that have strong, gene...

A bold reappraisal of human history upends long-held theories about early societies.

The Anthropocene has yet to be defined in a way that is functional both to the international geological community and to the broader fields of environmental and social sciences. Formally defining the Anthropocene as a chronostratigraphical series and geochronological epoch with a precise global start date would drastically reduce the Anthropocene’s...

Farmer wildlife management practices are critical to conserve biodiversity and ecosystem functions across intensively used agricultural landscapes. Policies and initiatives aimed at encouraging these practices have generally focused on economic incentives, with limited effectiveness. Farmer identity theory addresses the emergence of norms, values a...

This short correspondence to Nature from a group of geologists, archaeologists, anthropologists and geographers offers an alternative to defining the Anthropocene as an epoch on the chronostratigraphic time chart. It suggests instead that the Anthropocene should be regarded as a geological event.

The challenges posed by climate and land use change are increasingly complex, with rising and accelerating impacts on the global environmental system. Novel environmental and ecosystem research needs to properly interpret system changes and derive management recommendations across scales. This largely depends on advances in the establishment of an...

Modern human societies have negatively impacted native species richness and their adaptive capacity on every continent, in clearly contrasting ways. We propose a general model to explain how the sequence, duration and type of colonising society alternative species richness patterns through changes in evolutionary pressures. These changes cause diff...

Significance The current biodiversity crisis is often depicted as a struggle to preserve untouched habitats. Here, we combine global maps of human populations and land use over the past 12,000 y with current biodiversity data to show that nearly three quarters of terrestrial nature has long been shaped by diverse histories of human habitation and u...

In the 12,000 years preceding the Industrial Revolution, human activities led to significant changes in land cover, plant and animal distributions, surface hydrology, and biochemical cycles. Earth system models suggest that this anthropogenic land cover change influenced regional and global climate. However, the representation of past land use in e...

The term Anthropocene initially emerged from the Earth System science community in the early 2000s, denoting a concept that the Holocene Epoch has terminated as a consequence of human activities. First associated with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, it was then more closely linked with the Great Acceleration in industrialization and globali...

Technology is transforming societies worldwide. A major innovation is the emergence of robotics and autonomous systems(RAS), which have the potential to revolutionize cities for both people and nature. Nonetheless, the opportunities and challenges associated with RAS for urban ecosystems have yet to be considered systematically. Here, we report the...

Technology is transforming societies worldwide. A major innovation is the emergence of robotics and autonomous systems (RAS), which have the potential to revolutionize cities for both people and nature. Nonetheless, the opportunities and challenges associated with RAS for urban ecosystems have yet to be considered systematically. Here, we report th...

Stratigraphy provides insights into the evolution and dynamics of the Earth System over its long history. With recent developments in Earth System science, changes in Earth System dynamics can now be observed directly and projected into the near future. An integration of the two approaches provides powerful insights into the nature and significance...

ForestGEO is a network of scientists and long-term forest dynamics plots (FDPs) spanning the Earth's major forest types. ForestGEO's mission is to advance understanding of the diversity and dynamics of forests and to strengthen global capacity for forest science research. ForestGEO is unique among forest plot networks in its large-scale plot dimens...

ForestGEO is a network of scientists and long-term forest dynamics plots (FDPs) spanning the Earth's major forest types. ForestGEO's mission is to advance understanding of the diversity and dynamics of forests and to strengthen global capacity for forest science research. ForestGEO is unique among forest plot networks in its large-scale plot dimens...

International agreements aim to conserve 17% of Earth's land area by 2020 but include no area-based conservation targets within the working landscapes that support human needs through farming, ranching, and forestry. Through a review of country-level legislation, we found that just 38% of countries have minimum area requirements for conserving nati...

Leading up to the Convention on Biological Diversity Conference of the Parties 15, there is momentum around setting bold conservation targets. Yet, it remains unclear how much of Earth's land area remains without significant human influence and where this land is located. We compare four recent global maps of human influences across Earth's land, A...

Measuring, monitoring, and managing biodiversity across agricultural regions depends on methods that can combine high-resolution mapping of landscape patterns with local biodiversity observations. This study explores the potential to monitor biodiversity in agricultural landscapes by linking high-resolution remote sensing with passive acoustic moni...

Human populations and their use of land have reshaped landscapes for thousands of years, creating the anthropogenic biomes (anthromes) that now cover most of the terrestrial biosphere. Here we introduce the first global reconstruction and mapping of anthromes and their changes across the 12,000-year interval from 10,000 BCE to 2015 CE; the Anthrome...

Intact Forest Landscapes (IFLs) are critical strongholds for the environmental services that they provide, not least for their role in climate protection. On the basis of information about the distributions of IFLs and Indigenous Peoples’ lands, we examined the importance of these areas for conserving the world's remaining intact forests. We determ...

Human societies and their use of land have transformed ecology across this planet for thousands of years. As a result, the global patterns of life on Earth, the biomes, can no longer be understood without considering how humans have altered them. Anthromes, or anthropogenic biomes, characterize the globally significant ecological patterns created b...

The field of ecology has shifted from a relatively narrow focus on plant and animal populations and communities to more broadly understanding ecological patterns, processes and changes, including those shaped by interactions with human societies. This trend is embodied by the growth of research and scholarship investigating direct interactions betw...

A synthetic history of human land use Humans began to leave lasting impacts on Earth's surface starting 10,000 to 8000 years ago. Through a synthetic collaboration with archaeologists around the globe, Stephens et al. compiled a comprehensive picture of the trajectory of human land use worldwide during the Holocene (see the Perspective by Roberts)....

Human influences are reshaping plant communities around the world through both extinctions and species gains. New work relating biodiversity shifts to rapid changes in climate and land use highlights the need for new biogeographic frameworks to understand evolutionary change in the Anthropocene.

Human societies have long reshaped environments to sustain themselves. From bands of hunter-gatherers to agrarian empires to global supply chains, human societies have evolved unprecedented capacities to transform the biosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, and climate (1). Today, the ups and downs of economies and polities shape Earth's ecology as sur...

Land is increasingly managed to serve multiple societal demands. Beyond food, fiber, habitation, and recreation, land is now being called on to meet demands for carbon sequestration, water purification, biodiversity conservation, and many others. Meeting these multiple demands requires negotiating trade-offs among the choices and differing values p...

Archetypes are increasingly used as a methodological approach to understand recurrent patterns in variables and processes that shape the sustainability of social-ecological systems. The rapid growth and diversification of archetype analyses has generated variations, inconsistencies, and confusion about the meanings, potentials, and limitations of a...

A growing movement of conservationists proposes to stem biodiversity losses by setting aside half of Earth’s land as an interconnected global conservation reserve. As the largest land governance proposal in history, Half Earth engages with some of the wickedest challenges in land system science. How best to allocate and manage Earth’s land to maxim...

Human societies have been reshaping the geomorphology of landscapes for thousands of years, producing anthropogenic geomorphic features ranging from earthworks and reservoirs to settlements, roads, canals, ditches and plough furrows that have distinct characteristics compared with landforms produced by natural processes. Physical geographers have l...

This paper responds to and supports the earlier ‘Three Flaws’ paper by William Ruddiman (this journal, 2018). It builds upon his critique of the method used by the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) in determining the start date of the Anthropocene. While chronostratigraphy is acknowledged as the best means of establishing a framework for the divisio...

The call to set aside half of Earth's surface for nature conservation is gaining momentum across the conservation community. We propose that the experiences of Earth's most extensive conservation network, Natura 2000, offers important lessons on the challenges and opportunities of scaling up area-based conservation strategies. Natura 2000 has made...

Amid widespread concerns about biodiversity loss, a single clear conservation message is engaging leading conservationists: the proposal to give half the surface of the Earth back to nature. Depending on the landscape conservation strategy, we find that, globally, 15–31% of cropland, 10–45% of pasture land, 23–25% of non-food calories and 3–29% of...

Understanding the scale, location and nature conservation values of the lands over which Indigenous Peoples exercise traditional rights is central to implementation of several global conservation and climate agreements. However, spatial information on Indigenous lands has never been aggregated globally. Here, using publicly available geospatial res...

To understand ecological phenomena, it is necessary to observe their behaviour across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Since this need was first highlighted in the 1980s, technology has opened previously inaccessible scales to observation. To help to determine whether there have been corresponding changes in the scales observed by modern ecolo...

Humanity’s impact on the planet has been profound. From fire, intensive hunting, and agriculture, it has accelerated into rapid climate change, widespread pollution, plastic accumulation, species invasions, and the mass extinction of species—changes that have left a permanent mark in the geological record of the rocks. Yet the proposal for a new un...

Much scientific debate has focused on the timing and stratigraphic signatures for the Anthropocene. Here we review the Anthropocene in its original usage and as it has been imported by anthropology in light of evidence for long-term human-environment relationships. Strident debate about the Anthropocene’s chronological boundaries arises because its...

Concerns over rapid widespread changes in social-ecological systems and their consequences for biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, food security, and human livelihoods are driving demands for globally comprehensive knowledge to support decision-making and policy development. Claims of regional or global knowledge about the patterns, causes, and si...

Background: A number of conservation and societal issues require understanding how species are distributed on the landscape, yet ecologists are often faced with a lack of data to develop models at the resolution and extent desired, resulting in inefficient use of conservation resources. Such a situation presented itself in our attempt to develop wa...

To what degree is cultural multi-level selection responsible for the rise of environmentally transformative human behaviors? And vice versa? From the clearing of vegetation using fire to the emergence of agriculture and beyond, human societies have increasingly sustained themselves through practices that enhance environmental productivity through e...

As living standards, technological capacities, and human welfare have continued to improve, concerns have mounted about possible natural limits to economic and population growth. Climate change, habitat loss, and recent extinctions are examples of impacts on natural systems that have been used as markers of global environmental degradation associat...

The Anthropocene represents the emergence of human societies as a ‘great force of nature’. To understand and engage productively with this emergent global force, it is necessary to understand its origins, dynamics and structuring processes as the long-term evolutionary product of human niche construction, based on three key human characteristics: t...

If increasingly globalized societies are to make better land management decisions, the geosciences must globally evaluate how humans are reshaping Earth 's surface.

Even as it remains an informal term defining the emergence of humans as a force transforming Earth as a system, the Anthropocene is stimulating novel research and discussion across the academy and well beyond. While geography has always been deeply connected with the coupled human–environment paradigm, physical geographer’s embrace of the Anthropoc...

To face the challenges that anthropogenic global change poses to societal development, the ethical framework for Earth science needs to be robust and both accepted and personally adopted by geoscience professionals. Geoscience and engineering are increasingly called upon to inform societies about anticipated social and environmental outcomes based...

Imagine a planet without wild places. A planet so covered with aquaculture, plantations, rangelands, farms, villages, and cities that wild creatures and wild places, if they still exist at all, linger only at the margins of working landscapes, cityscapes, and seascapes.

We performed a rapid global assessment of the availability and robustness of conservation strategies for ecoregions. In some cases this involved assessment of large regions composed of multiple ecoregions. We found ecoregion and regional conservation strategies through internet searches, guided by Google Search Engine, Google Scholar, literature ci...

We assess progress toward the protection of 50% of the terrestrial biosphere to address the species-extinction crisis and conserve a global ecological heritage for future generations. Using a map of Earth's 846 terrestrial ecoregions, we show that 98 ecoregions (12%) exceed Half Protected; 313 ecoregions (37%) fall short of Half Protected but have...

Remote sensing of the structural and spectral traits of vegetation is being transformed by structure from motion (SFM) algorithms that combine overlapping images to produce three-dimensional (3D) red-green-blue (RGB) point clouds. However, much remains unknown about how these point clouds are used to observe vegetation, limiting the understanding o...

This is the link to the press release from University of Leicester for the new AWG paper authored by the above members of the working group: https://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/press/press-releases/2017/march/the-anthropocene-scientists-respond-to-criticisms-of-a-new-geological-epoch

A range of published arguments against formalizing the Anthropocene as a geological time unit have variously suggested that it is a misleading term of non-stratigraphic origin and usage, is based on insignificant temporal and material stratigraphic content unlike that used to define older geological time units, is focused on observation of human hi...

Maintaining wild places involves increasingly intensive human interventions. Several recent projects use semi-automated mediating technologies to enact conservation and restoration actions, including re-seeding and invasive species eradication. Could a deep-learning system sustain the autonomy of nonhuman ecological processes at designated sites wi...

The causes of Earth's transition are human and social, write Erle Ellis and colleagues, so scholars from those disciplines must be included in its formalization.

Why have humans changed the planet more profoundly, and in more varied ways, than any other species? Ellis argues that the answer lies in the unparalleled capacity of human societies to construct ecological niches at growing social and spatial scales. Ellis explains how, as a result of ongoing processes of sociocultural evolution, the human ecologi...

We assess the scale and extent of the physical technosphere, defined here as the summed material output of the contemporary human enterprise. It includes active urban, agricultural and marine components, used to sustain energy and material flow for current human life, and a growing residue layer, currently only in small part recycled back into the...

Different human societies shape landscapes differently. Anthroecology theory explains this long-term differential shaping of landscapes as the product of sociocultural niche construction (SNC): an evolutionary theory coupling social change with ecosystem engineering. The evolutionary mechanisms underpinning this theory cannot be tested without expe...

The scale, rate, and intensity of humans' environmental impact has engendered broad discussion about how to find plausible pathways of development that hold the most promise for fostering a better future in the Anthropocene. However, the dominance of dystopian visions of irreversible environmental degradation and societal collapse, along with overl...