Erle Ellis is professor of geography and environmental systems and director of the Laboratory for Anthropogenic Landscape Ecology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he teaches environmental science, landscape ecology and biogeochemistry. A plant biologist by training, he investigates in his research the ecology of human landscapes at local and global scales with the aim of informing the sustainable stewardship of the biosphere in the Anthropocene. Recent projects include the global mapping of human ecology (anthromes), online tools for global synthesis of local knowledge (GLOBE), and inexpensive user-deployed tools for mapping landscapes in 3D (Ecosynth).