A bird's-eye view of the footprint of mankind

Very green - but not very natural. High-definition satellite images show how humans are changing the earth. This is a shot of a forest plantation near Christchurch, New Zealand. Shadows and coloring show the trees' varying stages of growth.

Wadi is the term for a dry riverbed in North Africa, the Mideast and parts of Spain. At Wadi as-Sahba in Saudi Arabia, bright green spots glow like oases in the desert where fodder is grown in circular irrigation fields.

Thousands of mirrors reflect the rays of sun on top of the towers at two solar power plants, Planta 10 and Planta 20, in Seville in southern Spain. Temperatures can rise up to 1000 degrees Celsius, and that's used to create energy. Each mirror is half the size of a tennis court.

In mid-May, the countryside surrounding Lübeck in northern Germany is yellow - rapeseed is in bloom everywhere. The oilseed is widely grown for vegetable oil, but it is also increasingly used to power engines in the form of so-called biofuel.

The pristine rain forest in the Malaysian province Sarawak is one of the largest in the world. Often, rivers are the only way to travel inland - at least for now, that is, since large parts have already been cleared to make way for fields and plantations.

The huge agricultural expanses near Beaumont in Australia are scattered with countless saline pools. Algae and the varying saline content in the soil are responsible for the bright colors. The high salinity makes agriculture difficult for farmers.

The town of Weston was designed on the drawing board and created by banking up islands in the swamps of the US state of Florida. The affluent town of about 66.000 inhabitants was built right next to Florida's subtropical wetlands, the Everglades National Park.

The beach at the ship demolition dockyard near Chittagong in Bangladesh is swarming with people. Tankers and container ships wait to be gutted. Workers here risk their health on a daily basis - there is little interest in on-the-job safety or environmental protection.

Olive trees stand on every hill in the Spanish province Jaen - a total of 50 million. Olive oil from Italy may be more famous, but here, in the world's largest producing region, about 600,000 litres of the finest olive oil are pressed every year.

New luxury villas go up in the Arab emirate of Qatar, complete with their own harbor. The artificial islands look like pearls threaded on a necklace. People in Qatar use an average of 31 tonnes of CO2 a year - twice as much as Americans, three times as much as Germans, four times as much as people in China.

China's sandy loam highland is vast. The fertile soil is perfectly suited for agriculture, so farmers have for hundreds of years grown crops on terraces built into the Bashang highland. Here, cultivating rice is still hard manual labor, sometimes with the help of draft animals.

The largest diamond mine in the world is located in Botswana in southern Africa. Minerals color the rock blue. Diamonds have been won here since 1971 and, according to estimates, the area still has another 50 years worth of diamonds.

These pictures come from "Human Footprint," a picture book published by eoVision, a company which provides satellite data and geo information, and they show how radically man has already interfered with nature - the example shown here is Venice, Italy.