Historical change in anthromes

Since mankind began clearing land and domesticating favored plants and animals at the start of the Holocene, the terrestrial biosphere has been transformed into anthropogenic biomes or anthromes. A first attempt to reconstruct global changes in anthrome distribution from 10,000 BCE to 2015 CE (the Anthromes12K dataset) was derived by using human population density and land use from the History of the Global Environment (HYDE) database (version 3.2), in combination with alternate anthromes classification schemes. At the beginning of the Holocene almost 40% of the Earth's land surface was classified as completely wild, without human settlement or agriculture. The remaining 60% was classified as seminatural with only minor areas of agriculture and settlements, where 33% of the seminatural class was classified as inhabited treeless and barren lands and 26% as remote woodlands. The first significant areas of cropland and rangeland anthromes emerged around 1 CE (2%) slowly increasing to 5% in 1000 CE. Villages and dense settlements still occupied hardly any space that time (0.2%). The global extent of croplands and rangelands increased by agricultural expansion into wildlands and intensification of land use to 9.4% in 1700 CE and this process accelerated to the end of the 20th century to a share of almost 42%. Villages and dense settlements occupying 8% of the global land surface. Al this happened at the expense of seminatural lands who decreased in area by 35.5% and wildlands who lost 14.5% of their original area. This transformation took not place evenly distributed over the Earth and over time, but varied greatly across regions and biomes, depicting large differences in the onset of agriculture.