Assistant Professor Navin Ramankutty of McGill University in Montreal and Professor Erle Ellis of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County said the current system of classifying ecosystems into biomes, or "ecological communities" such as tropical rainforests, grasslands and deserts, might be misleading. Instead, they propose a new model of human-centered "anthropogenic" biomes.

"Ecologists go to remote parts of the planet to study pristine ecosystems, but no one studies it in their back yard," said Ramankutty. "It's time to start putting instrumentation in our back yards -- both literal and metaphorical -- to study what's going on there in terms of ecosystem functioning."

The research is presented in the Nov. 19 issue of the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.