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A wild 'freakosystem' has been born in Hawaii

Ecosystems which have never been seen before are being accidentally created by humans. They offer a stark look into the nature of tomorrow.

For the last decade scientists have studied O'ahu as an 'amazing crystal ball' that offers a glimpse of the future of our planet – Jef Vizentin-BugoniOne former shale oil mine between the Scottish cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow left a mountain made of stone, says Eric Higgs, professor of ecology at the University of Victoria in Canada. Hawaii's plants and the birds that remained there therefore evolved largely in isolation from the rest of the world, leading to the evolution of species found nowhere else on the planet, from "flightless ibises to bird-hunting owls", writes anthropologist Todd Braje in his 2024 book Understanding Imperiled Earth. Matthew Kerr, a researcher in Svenning's lab at Aarhus University who made the map, says he found that novel habitats are now truly global, with more than half of the earth's land highly changed: "This extended out to protected areas," he says, including nature parks and marine reserves.

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