What is an anthropogenic ecosystem?
Fuhlendorf: An anthropogenic ecosystem is an ecosystem that’s maintained by humans. In reality, there are not ecosystems that are anthropogenic and those that are not anthropogenic. A better way to view it is as a gradient where some ecosystems are largely influenced by humans, and some are less influenced by humans. For example, many people think that Yellowstone is not a highly influenced landscape, but in reality it is. Most landscapes now are managed by humans, and many of the landscapes that we saw historically—in the 1800s, for example—were actually already being managed by humans, in some cases very intensively. Q: For most people, preservation means you don’t touch it: Let it be whatever it wants to be. The approach to preserving the tallgrass prairie goes against that, though. Fuhlendorf: It’s true that we think of the rain forest, for example, and when we preserve that, typically what we try to do is remove human influence from the area. But when you start understanding that
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