The Ultimate Ecosystem Engineers

By Bruce D. Smith. Science, 2007

144 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Anthropology, General Health Professions, Paleontology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3c8b6bcf7e56490833f6f57962e58163346e7cf1

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Anthropology

1. M. Zeder
2. Erle C. Ellis
3. Kevin N. Laland
4. J. Odling-Smee
5. S. Lev-Yadun
6. S. Abbo
7. A. Gopher
8. Bruce D. Smith

In General Health Professions

1. M. Zeder
2. Erle C. Ellis
3. S. Lev-Yadun
4. S. Abbo
5. A. Gopher
6. Kevin N. Laland

In Paleontology

1. Erle C. Ellis
2. M. Zeder
3. Bruce D. Smith
4. Kevin N. Laland
5. S. Abbo
6. J. Odling-Smee
7. S. Lev-Yadun
8. A. Gopher

Citations in the corpus

• The Origins of Agriculture in the Near East (2011, background): “…arose in the context of broad-based systematic human efforts at modifying local environments and biotic communities to encourage plant and animal resources of economic interest, a practice that has been characterized as human niche construction or ecosystem engineering (Smith 2007a, 2007b, 2011).”
• Ecology in an anthropogenic biosphere (2015, background): “To understand the evolution of ecosystem engineering by humans, ‘‘the ultimate ecosystem engineers,’’ the effects of directly beneficial ecological inheritance are paramount (Laland et al. 2000, Odling-Smee et al. 2003a, Smith 2007b).”
• More on how and why: cause and effect in biology revisited (2013, background): “…advocacy of reciprocal causation, within anthropology, archaeology, and other human sciences (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Richerson and Boyd 2005; Smith 2007a, b; Fuentes 2009; Bickerton 2009; O’Brien and Laland 2012; see special editions of journals edited by Pyne and Riel-Salvatore 2010, and…”
• Plant Domestication and Crop Evolution in the Near East: On Events and Processes (2012, background): “…Abbo et al., 2010b, 2011b), the driving forces (e.g., Bar-Yosef and Belfer-Cohen, 1992), the nature of man-plants relations (e.g., Rindos, 1980; Smith, 2007; Laland and O’Brien, 2010), the role of conscious vs. unconscious selection (e.g., Heiser, 1988; Zohary, 2004; Abbo et al., 2005,…”
• A Comparison of Niche Construction Theory and Diet Breadth Models as Explanatory Frameworks for the Initial Domestication of Plants and Animals (2015, background): “This is not surprising, given that humans are ‘‘the ultimate niche constructors’’ (Odling-Smee et al. 2003, p. 28; Smith 2007a).”