Used planet: A global history

By Erle C. Ellis, Jed O. Kaplan, D. Fuller, S. Vavrus, Kees Klein Goldewijk, Peter H. Verburg. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013

731 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Human use of land has transformed ecosystem pattern and process across most of the terrestrial biosphere, a global change often described as historically recent and potentially catastrophic for both humanity and the biosphere. Interdisciplinary paleoecological, archaeological, and historical studies challenge this view, indicating that land use has been extensive and sustained for millennia in some regions and that recent trends may represent as much a recovery as an acceleration. Here we synthesize recent scientific evidence and theory on the emergence, history, and future of land use as a process transforming the Earth System and use this to explain why relatively small human populations likely caused widespread and profound ecological changes more than 3,000 y ago, whereas the largest and wealthiest human populations in history are using less arable land per person every decade. Contrasting two spatially explicit global reconstructions of land-use history shows that reconstructions incorporating adaptive changes in land-use systems over time, including land-use intensification, offer a more spatially detailed and plausible assessment of our planet's history, with a biosphere and perhaps even climate long ago affected by humans. Although land-use processes are now shifting rapidly from historical patterns in both type and scale, integrative global land-use models that incorporate dynamic adaptations in human–environment relationships help to advance our understanding of both past and future land-use changes, including their sustainability and potential global effects.

Subfields: Anthropology, Atmospheric Science, Paleontology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f738f3b4793a8868e6f8970c70653d2b7183c1ce

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Citations in the corpus

The Anthropocene biosphere (2015, background): “lacking significant anthropogenic influence) with humans disturbing them, but rather is characterised by a combination of human engineered and used ecosystems and more or less modified novel ecosystems (Ellis and Ramankutty, 2008; Ellis et al., 2013b; Halpern et al., 2013; Perring and Ellis, 2013).”
Over the hills and further away from coast: global geospatial patterns of human and environment over the 20th–21st centuries (2016, background): “…combined (Small et al 2000, Small 2001, Small and Nicholls 2003, Small 2004); distance from rivers and lakes (Small 2004, Kummu et al 2011); latitude (Kummu and Varis 2011); land use changes (Ellis et al 2013); urban land expansion (Fragkias et al 2013); and biomes (Ellis and Ramankutty 2008).”
The Concept of the Anthropocene (2017, background): “More broadly and less quantifiably, it is a label for a broad curiosity and concern about the state of the Earth, and about the well-being of both the immediate human and natural worlds in a context “after Nature” (90), where no aspect of the natural world is free from human influence [although the ”
Ecology in an anthropogenic biosphere (2015, background): “…up from hunter-gatherers to industrial societies, they also accumulated technological and organizational capabilities for ecosystem engineering and subsistence exchange that enabled their populations to grow well beyond the capacity of unaltered ecosystems to support them (Ellis et al. 2013b).”
Global patterns of agricultural land‐use intensity and vertebrate diversity (2015, background): “For the purpose of our study, we define agricultural landuse intensity as the degree of adoption of land management practices enabling yield increases from a given area of agricultural land (Matson et al., 1997; Ellis et al., 2013).”
Challenges for Social-Ecological Transformations: Contributions from Social and Political Ecology (2017, background): “Also, ~75% of the ice-free area are already used for infrastructure, housing, cropping, livestock grazing and forestry, although with widely varying intensity [72,73].”
Features and Functions of Multifunctional Urban Agriculture in the Global North: A Review (2020, background): “, 2010), suggesting more intense rotations in the former, a phenomenon that has also been associated with higher population density (Ellis et al., 2013).”
Transitions in European land-management regimes between 1800 and 2010 (2015, background): “This is problematic, because much change in land systems occurs along intensification pathways (Rudel et al., 2009; Ellis et al., 2013; Erb et al., 2013), and intensification is expected to become the dominant future land change (Tilman et al.”
Global assessment of urban and peri-urban agriculture: irrigated and rainfed croplands (2014, background): “The new data on urban croplands could also allow further testing globally, at a fine spatial resolution, of the much discussed relationship between population density and the intensity with which croplands are farmed [27, 28].”
Capturing the complexity of biodiversity: A critical review of economic valuation studies of biological diversity (2015, background): “When alien species are used as a proxy, biodiversity is implicitly identified with a notion of ‘original pristinity’, which has been criticised as naïve since truly pristine ecosystems hardly exist (Ellis et al., 2013; Hobbs et al., 2013).”
The historical reference in restoration ecology: Re-defining a cornerstone concept (2014, background): “Anthropogenic disturbance and transformation are nearly ubiquitous on emerged lands worldwide and apparently go back at least 3000 years for much of the inhabited portions of our planet (Ellis et al., 2013).”
Projecting the continental accumulation of alien species through to 2050 (2020, positive): “Furthermore, the dynamics of important drivers of alien species introduction and establishment (e.g. trade, human population density and land-use intensity) exhibit considerable variation among continents in recent history (Ellis et al., 2013).”