According to newly published research by SFI External Professor Melinda Zeder and colleagues, human niche construction has dramatically re-shaped the global biosphere over time as Homo sapiens evolved the advanced capacity to engineer ecosystems.
Drawing from archeological and paleological datasets, the researchers outline four major phases of human impact to biodiversity among “millennia of anthropogenic transformations that have created novel ecosystems around the world.”
Read the paper in PNAS (June 7, 2016)