So much of the uniformity and barrenness that people associate with human interaction with ecosystems results from very specific, intentional patterns of land use and management, not something inherent to human land use and management.
What I mean by that is: we observe "human-dominated" ecosystems having very flat, hostile characteristics, but we see this specific pattern because there are specific things we are doing in uniform ways across large areas.
The thing is, human interaction could create a virtually infinite amount of ecosystems.
Sites with unique, non-typical, or chaotic histories of human use and management often have extremely novel assemblages of species. This would be an interesting thing to formally research.
My best friend and I were exploring an area of land where there was a stone chimney and the remnants of a well, piles of rocks marking where the foundation of a small house had collapsed. It was close to a river, the slope was steep and there was a powerline cut through it.
It was easy to tell that approximately fifty or sixty years ago, the land had been bare and pretty much treeless, and most likely had been highly eroded, because the composition of trees was almost entirely eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana) with a couple of impressive honeylocust (Gleditsia tricanthos). These trees typically grow on areas that are rocky and barren with too little soil for other species to survive.
The lower part of the forest was taken up with an enormous (by modern standards) canebrake, stretching hundreds of feet on each side, with canes that were almost 15 feet tall. This was immediately confusing because cane enjoys incredibly deep soil (sometimes growing roots 10 feet deep in the ground).
In the powerline cut, there were big patches of black raspberry. (Black raspberry is easily identified in wintertime because of the smooth pinkish-purple canes they have in winter, with a chalky-looking white bloom on them. They are delicious, and if you take really good care of a patch and pamper it, it can give you gallons of raspberries.) Bits of slag were eroding out of the steep slope, and my best friend found a railroad spike. There was a collapsed railroad bridge not too far from the location, so we guessed that a railroad might have passed through at some point in the past. Invasive species were prevalent, wintercreeper, honeysuckle, and some species of privet I was unfamiliar with, but they didn't completely overtake everything.
Red cedar and rivercane are very interesting to see together. Theoretically, they prefer opposite habitat types, and have opposite fire tolerances: rivercane LOVES fire, whereas redcedar hates it and easily dies to fire. They also have the strange distinction, in some areas of Kentucky, of being almost the only native evergreen woody plants.
Further up into the cedar-rivercane forest, away from the road, the forest floor was carpeted in an absolutely sumptuous layer of moss. There was moss coating the tree trunks and dripping off the branches.
There were even bits of moss growing from the joints of the rivercane, either snagged there somehow or growing there as epiphytes, which I had NEVER seen or heard of before (epiphytic moss on rivercane!!!!! imagine!!!!) but it seemed unlikely that moss would somehow get caught accidentally on the rivercanes. (Old rivercane stems are, anyway, theoretically a good habitat for epiphytes: the new twigs that grow each year slowly build up into thickety bundles that gather fallen leaves and debris. That's why birds love to nest in there.)
On the ground there were large patches of Climacium moss, which is known as tree-moss because it is very bushy and stands up a couple inches, rather than clinging to the surface it's on. This seemed extraordinary, because Climacium is a rather conservative moss, typically only found in very moist interiors of mature forests, and here it was growing in luxurious bounty in this crappy, marginal patch of land that had been abused and razed over in diverse ways over the past century.
The railroad, the slag, the powerline cut, the ruins of the old house, the rocky and eroded soil...a strange convergence of land use histories. Likewise, a strange convergence of species.
I'm intrigued by the possibility that humans could create novel ecosystems, because we seem to do it accidentally quite a lot.
But there seems to be very little formal academic interest in the bizarre, unique plant communities that emerge from the seethe of human activity as it uses, abandons, re-appropriates, and disturbs land.
