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We should learn to reject words like mostly, largely and vastly and instead demand percentages, confidence intervals and references.

Can you provide this to back up your statement that land on earth is mostly occupied by humans, crops and domesticated animals?



There are very well known studies, e.g.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115

whose conclusions are that, by mass, the humans alone are many times more than all the wild terrestrial vertebrates together, while obviously the domesticated animals exceed a few times the humans, both in number and mass.

Of course the number and mass of animals are only partially correlated with the area occupied by them, because the larger some wild animals are, the less their surface density is, and except for animals as small as rodents or small birds their surface density is much less than that of humans in cities.

There are a few countries with a relatively low density of population, e.g. most of North America, Russia, Australia, the northern European countries (Finland, Sweden, Norway).

I am not familiar with the land status in these countries, but these are the only places on Earth where there is a chance for some areas occupied by wildlife to form a connected mesh, allowing slow migration, but even that must be sectioned by many roads and fences that may discourage the migration of animals from the places that they have inhabited from birth.

Other low human density areas on Earth, i.e. the tropical forests and the deserts, do not count, as they will not be destinations for animals or plants seeking lower temperatures. Of the other areas with low human density, only in the high mountains there would be possible migrations, when the animals and plants adapted to high altitudes and lower temperatures could die and be replaced by animals and plants coming from lower altitudes. Except that in many countries most of the wildlife is already in the mountains, so there might be very few wild animals and plants left at lower altitude, ready to replace the former inhabitants from high altitudes, which will never have any way out.

On the other hand I am more familiar with the status in Western and Eastern Europe and in some parts of Asia, where I have traveled frequently through several countries.

Here, it is enough to fly a plane over several European countries in a sunny day, and you will see only agricultural land, villages and cities, with only isolated and scattered remains of forests, lakes or uncultured land, or isolated parts of mountains that remain wild.

There already is a great difference between how some places were when I was young and I traveled to them and how they are now. Several decades ago, there were relatively large connected wild areas in some mountains, but meanwhile a lot of roads have fragmented the mountains, owners have built fences around land parcels, some forests have been cut and so on, so where there was a larger wild area now there are many disconnected smaller wild areas.


According to the following link, 50% of the earth is relatively untouched while 20% is classified as built up urban areas or cropland.

https://earth.org/half-of-earths-land-surface-remains-relati...




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