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About the SI 特刊背景介绍 What makes a habitable planet? Scientists frequently point to the abiotic factors that allow life to exist on Earth. However, biotic factors (and in particular, the emergence of new biological behaviors) have been equally important in creating environmental conditions favorable for the emergence of complex life. Life is thus a powerful geological force, and the present-day configuration of the planetary ‘spheres’ (including the composition of our atmosphere, the structure and chemistry of our oceans, and the dynamics of global geological cycles) are the result of 3.8 billion years of increasingly complex geobiological interactions. With successive waves of evolutionary innovations through time, life has created new ecological opportunities, destroyed others, and exerted ever more powerful controls over Earth systems. Ecologists refer to organisms that alter resource flows and thus create, modify, and/or destroy ecological niches in this fashion as
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