My work explores the ecology of human landscapes and their changes from local to global scales, including human transformation and sustainable stewardship of the biosphere (anthromes, anthroecology), tools for global synthesis of local knowledge (GLOBE), inexpensive tools for measuring and managing ecological change across anthropogenic landscapes (Ecosynth, Anthropogenic Ecotope Mapping), and long-term ecological changes across China’s village landscapes. All of these efforts come together in my main goal: informing sustainable stewardship of the biosphere in the Anthropocene. I teach courses in environmental science and landscape ecology at UMBC, and I’ve taught ecology at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. I am currently a lead author of the Transformative Change Assessment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), a member of the Anthropocene Working Group, a Fellow of the Global Land Programme, a Senior Fellow of the Breakthrough Institute, and an advisor to the Nature Needs Half movement. I’ve published more than 100 scientific articles, and I’m recognized as a global highly cited researcher. I am the 2021 to 2024 Presidential Research Professor at UMBC. My first book, Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction, was published in 2018
The history and evolution of anthromes
E. C. ELLIS
Department of Geography & Environmental Systems, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 211 Sondheim Hall, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA
Anthromes were introduced in 2007 in mapping the globally significant patterns of terrestrial ecology shaped by human populations and their use of land. Anthrome mapping and classification is analogous to the mapping of natural vegetation biomes in relation to the global patterns of climate and terrain, but instead stratifies regional landscapes into categories in relation to their population densities and areas of intensive land uses (crops, pastures, and cities). Rather than homogeneous landscapes, anthromes represent the diverse, multifunctional and heterogeneous landscape mosaics that emerge through sustained human-environment interactions and include less intensive land uses such as foraging, hunting, forestry, conservation, restoration, and fallow, together with the remnant habitats embedded within working landscapes. Ecologists, conservationists, land planners, educators, and others have used anthrome maps in global assessments of ecosystem change, biodiversity patterns, and conservation strategies, and in numerous textbooks and atlases. Most recently, anthromes have been mapped from 10,000 BCE to 2017 CE, characterizing the deep history and vast extent of human transformation of ecology across the planet, and their legacy in shaping biodiversity today. The utility of an anthrome approach to long-term global assessments of carbon sequestration and emissions will be discussed.