, , , , ,

UW Researcher’s Study Says Arrival Of Humans Disrupted Plants, Animals

Study: Invasive Species An Example Of Changes Humans Made To World's Ecosystem

By
section of earth as viewed from space
Royce Bair (CC-BY-NC-ND)  

A study co-authored by a Wisconsin researcher says that when humans showed up on Earth, changes came to a plant-animal association that had lasted 300 million years.

Scientists looked at fossil records and found that some plant and animal species were in the same place and time. The species were what researchers describe as “positively associated” for much of the existence of multicellular life on Earth.

But Don Waller, the study co-author and UW-Madison botany professor, said that things started to change about 6,000 years ago.

Stay informed on the latest news

Sign up for WPR’s email newsletter.

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

“We have now fewer positive and more negative association, and this coincides more or less with big increases in human population and human impacts,” he said.

Waller said an example of negative association is humans spreading out and bringing along non-native species that crowd out native plants and animals.

The study on species association is published in the journal Nature.

Related Stories