How Animals Shape our Planet

Harvard FAS

How do animals shape our planet? Do their roles matter when compared with other seemingly obvious and dominant drivers such as climate, soils, topography or plants? These have been core questions in ecology for over half a century, yet the contributions made by animals to large-scale environmental processes and patterns remain elusive and difficult to quantify. This course examines the existing scientific literature on animal-driven contributions to large-scale environmental processes,…