Biosphere 2 and the Study of Human/Ecosystem Dynamics

Biosphere 2 is a materially closed, 1.28 hectare facility in Arizona designed for research ranging from organismic to systems ecology, including opportunities for management by humans of a total ecological system. It was also designed to serve as an educational tool toward the understanding of Earth processes and the consequences of human actions, and for the development of technologies, products, and know-how for commercial application and exploitation. Biosphere 2 is financed through venture capital investment, and it is expected to spawn many discoveries with application not only to environmental and ecological problems facing our planet today, but also to future human activities in space.