Novel Ecology is dedicated to ‘novel ecosystems’, to anthropogenic adaptations, to pick-and-mix communities, to the strange ecology emerging in our modern world. Humanity is reshaping natural systems across the globe through climate changes, altered habitats, species introductions and extinctions. New niches are opening, old ones are closing up. Ranges are expanding and shrinking, surprise behaviours are appearing and food webs are being re-woven. From urban peregrines to knotweed carpets to Australian buffalo, we are seeing the emergence of ecosystems which would never exist without human influence.

I’m here to look at some of these changes, their causes and their effects, even taking a glance at the future of this weird, unnatural nature. These changes fascinate me as much as they scare me, testing the limits to which nature can flex, throwing distant species together, building all new niches out of stone and glass. The whole world has become a runaway experiment and we are its observers, watching in real time one of the fastest and greatest global changes in the history of life. Welcome to the brave new wild, the great upheavel, the domain of humanity: welcome to an ecological evolution revolution and a world of Novel Ecology.

What counts as ‘novel ecology’?

Change is the only constant in life, so the Greek philosopher Heraclitus once wrote. Everything is always in flux, mixing and mutating, growing and collapsing, moving and migrating. But some changes are greater than others, and we are undergoing great change at the moment. So great, in fact, that there are calls for the modern day to be recognised as a new era in geological and evolutionary time: the Anthropocene. I would argue humans have been leaving their mark for a good time longer than this, but either way, the change has accelerated up to today and hardly an inch of the Earth is left unaltered.

Novel ecosystems are the habitats developed under human influence, and the communities of species living there. They are urban, agricultural, warmed by climate change, littered with plastics, host to organisms which evolved in entirely different places. And as these organisms interact with each other and their new homes, as they adapt or die, so new systems and processes emerge. Novel ecology describes the way in which these species mingle, how they affect each other or their new habitats, the lives they live in their altered landscape. Things are changing so quickly researchers can hardly keep up. It’s an understudied, exciting, alarming topic. Which makes it just so incredibly interesting.

If everything always changes, should we really be worried?

Yes.

Things may always change, but they tend to do so within a certain distance of an average. Change one way and they usually bounce back again. More permanent processes, like the migration of rivers or collapse of cliffs, are continual but gradual on the scale of years to millennia. Natural change has its limits.

Unnatural, human change is fast and widespread. On ecological scales it is blindingly fast, far beyond normality and what most evolutionary processes can keep up with. Such rapid change on a global scale has occurred before, as a set of terrible mass extinctions in deep time, and the natural world always recovered.

But modern human society, sprung up since industrialisation, is built with the world a certain way. We depend on reliable natural systems: the wet season brings rain, the soil nourishes crops, the fish stocks replenish, there will always be another patch of forest to fell for timber. These systems are breaking down. We are fixed in certain rhythms reflecting resources on which we can no longer rely and our very basest foundations are shifting like a house in an earthquake. Human-caused ecological and environmental change is fascinating but it is also perhaps the greatest threat our society has yet faced.