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Mapping Anthropogenic Biomes



Yesterday’s post was about a site that categorized biomes with very fine divisions based on vegetation, soil moisture, surface lithology, etc., all with the underlying concept that for most areas this was a representation of an actual natural biome. The creators of the concept of anthropogenic biomes go in a different direction; they believe that the impact of man upon the natural landscape has been so profound, with only about 11% of the earth’s surface still truly6 wild,  that most of the biomes of the world must be described by at least partially including the effects of mankind. They’ve broken down biomes into just 21 categories:

Anthro_biomes_legend_v2

And created a world map using these categories:

anthrome_map_v1

You can download a PDF of the above image, an ArcGrid file for use in ArcGIS, or a KML file for viewing in Google Earth on this page. Viewed in Google Earth:

anthrobiomes

Also available are map viewers for this data in Google Maps and Virtual Earth (latter didn’t work on Firefox for me).

You can watch a Discovery Channel video on the concept of anthropogenic biomes here.

Via Highly Allochthonous.


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