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Ecology

Different worlds

Nature volume 529, pages 29–30 (2016)Cite this article

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Patterns of species association reveal that terrestrial plant and animal communities today are structured differently from communities spanning the 300 million years that preceded large-scale human activity. See Letter p.80

The British author L. P. Hartley wrote in one of his best-known novels, The Go-Between, that “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” This poignant imagery of remoteness from the past captures the essence of an emerging global consciousness. Human hegemony over nature has become so pervasive and profound that it is quite possible that we have created a world that has little or no precedent — in ecological parlance, it has no analogue. On page 80 of this issue, Lyons et al.1 detail a compelling case that this extraordinary situation is an undeniable reality for the rules that govern how plant and animal communities are structured.

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Figure 1: Species associations.

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  1. USA and in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Gregory P. Dietl is at the Paleontological Research Institution, Ithaca, New York 14850, Cornell University, Ithaca.,

    Gregory P. Dietl

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  1. Gregory P. Dietl
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Correspondence to Gregory P. Dietl.

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Dietl, G. Different worlds. Nature 529, 29–30 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature16329

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