For those concerned about population growth and its impact on the biosphere, it always helpful to discover new ways of looking at how human activity is impacting the environment.  Earlier this week, I came across "Anthropogenic Biomes," an article by Dr. Erle Ellis at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Navin Ramankutty at McGill University in Montreal, that appeared on Earth Portal. 

For those not familiar with the term, biomes classify the earth's surface according to the dominant vegetation.  On land, there are four broad classifications of biomes: tundra, forest, grassland and desert.  The authors discuss a relatively new model or system of classification-anthropogenic biomes (sometimes called anthromes)-that refers to "the terrestrial biosphere in its human-altered form."

Here's how they explain it:

This new model of the biosphere moves us away from an outdated view of the world as "natural ecosystems with humans disturbing them" and towards a vision of "human systems with natural ecosystems embedded within them". This is a major change in perspective but it is critical for sustainable management of our biosphere in the 21st century.

In discussing the anthropogenic biome model, they make some thought-provoking observations:

Humans are the ultimate ecosystem engineers, routinely reshaping ecosystem form and process using tools and technologies, such as fire, that are beyond the capacity of any other organism. This exceptional capacity for ecosystem engineering, expressed in the form of agriculture, forestry, industry and other activities, has helped to sustain unprecedented population growth, such that humans now consume about one third of all terrestrial net primary production, move more earth and produce more reactive nitrogen than all other terrestrial processes combined, and are causing global extinctions and changes in climate that are comparable to any observed in the natural record. Clearly, humans are now a force of nature rivaling climate and geology in shaping the terrestrial biosphere and its processes. As a result, the vegetation forms predicted by conventional biome systems are now rarely observed across large areas of Earth's land surface.

So what kind of "Anthropogenic Biomes" are they talking about?

Anthropogenic biomes are not simple vegetation categories, and are best characterized as heterogeneous landscape mosaics combining a variety of different land uses and land covers. Urban areas are embedded within agricultural land, trees are interspersed with croplands and housing, and managed vegetation is mixed with semi-natural vegetation (e.g. croplands are embedded within rangelands and forests). 

But to really get a better "anthromic" perspective, take a look at the anthropogenic biome maps.