Washington Post
April 23, 2021
As scientists rush to preserve biodiversity, they often focus on untouched landscapes teeming with life. But how untouched are they? Not as much as you might think.
A study shows that over the past 12,000 years, nearly three-fourths of nature has been shaped by humans — and that traditional land uses actually encouraged biodiversity.
The paper, published in the journal PNAS, challenges existing notions about the history of land use. Past assessments have argued that as late as the 16th century, the majority of land on Earth was uninhabited.
But when an international team of researchers tested those assumptions, they uncovered a different story. By overlaying data on human populations and land use throughout history with information on biodiversity, they found that contrary to the common belief that only untouched land has high biodiversity, it actually existed and flourished in land shaped by humans.