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Science 21 December 2007:
Vol. 318. no. 5858, p. 1839
DOI: 10.1126/science.318.5858.1839c
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Random Samples
CREDIT: E. ELLIS AND N. RAMANKUTTY
A pair of earth scientists have combined data on population distribution with data on land use and land cover to generate a global map of "anthropogenic biomes." It's "a first go at looking at how humans have restructured the biosphere," says Erle Ellis of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who created the map with Navin Ramankutty of McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Existing biome maps have only rudimentary classifications for human-altered areas, Ellis says. This one, presented last week at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California, shows 21 categories, including urban (red) and barren (gray), with subdivisions covering various types of villages, croplands, rangelands, forests, and wild lands. The blues in this map of China and Taiwan stand for rice-growing villages and irrigated villages. "I think this [work] is going to have far-reaching effects," says global modeler Jonathan Foley of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "Now we can better describe the real biosphere … in our maps, models, and ecological field studies."
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