[U-04] Environments of the Anthropocene: Natural Diversity and Resilience Perspective

[U04-01] Planetary-scale change to the biosphere leaves a fossil record that can be used to identify the Anthropocene

★Invited Papers

*Mark Williams¹ (1.School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, University of Leicester, United Kingdom)

Keywords:Anthropocene, biosphere, palaeontology

Over the past ten millennia humans have halved the mass of the biosphere, concentrated most of the mass of terrestrial mammals in themselves and the animals that feed them, and in their billions of individuals now account for most of the numerical abundance of primates. Humans have systematically reconfigured ecosystems globally and translocated 1000s of non-native species therein. Many of these changes have left a distinctive palaeontological signature in the sedimentary record, one likely to be recognisable in most regions and ecosystems of the world, and one which may help to define a new epoch of geological time, the Anthropocene. In due course, if humans continue their trajectory of biosphere change, the fossil record of the Anthropocene may come to match those of major extinction and macroevolutionary episodes of the deep past.