Humans change plants

Historically the surface of the Earth has been transformed from natural landscapes consisting of wilderness and wild plants, to cultural landscapes consisting of cultivated anthropogenic or man-made plants. This may be treated scientifically as a question of plant geography.

Cultivated plant geography
But then there is the way that economic botany has impacted world vegetation at a planetary scale. This is cultivated plant floristics – the study of the composition and distribution of cultivated plants on planet Earth and its change over time. Here several key events are discussed some detail: the impact that occurred in prehistory through fire and other forms of vegetation disturbance; the origin and development of plant cultivation and its appropriation of land specifically for this purpose; the domestication of plants by genetic manipulation – their selection, breeding, and genetic modification; the large-scale redistribution of plants across the planet; and the human-managed integration of economic botany with other human and planetary processes for the benefit of both humans and the community of life. The latter topic is addressed under the heading ‘Sustainability’.