The Six Environments Where Humans Live

The science

The traditional biome map divides the world by climate and vegetation – rainforest, desert, tundra. But that picture is increasingly out of date, because people now shape most of the land. Ecologists Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty proposed a different framework: anthromes, or anthropogenic biomes, which classify the planet by how humans actually use it. Their work showed that human-altered lands cover more than three-quarters of Earth's ice-free surface.

Rather than 'natural' biomes, they mapped categories like dense settlements, villages, croplands, rangelands and seminatural land – a portrait of the terrestrial world as people have remade it.

How we turned it into a print

We assigned each anthrome a distinct color and let the mosaic emerge – the croplands of the American Midwest, the dense village belts of India and China, the vast rangelands of Central Asia. It is a map that quietly reframes how you see the planet: not wilderness dotted with people, but a human world with wilderness at its edges.

The print

From our Spectrum collection, The World as the Six Environments Where Humans Live is printed on premium paper in 70x50 cm and 100x70 cm. Data source: Ellis & Ramankutty, Anthropogenic Biomes of the World.