Managing the middle: A shift in conservation priorities based on the global human modification gradient
By Chris J. Kennedy, J. Oakleaf, David M. Theobald, S. Baruch‐Mordo, Joseph Kiesecker. Global Change Biology, 2019
617 citations recorded by the source corpus.
An increasing number of international initiatives aim to reconcile development with conservation. Crucial to successful implementation of these initiatives is a comprehensive understanding of the current ecological condition of landscapes and their spatial distributions. Here, we provide a cumulative measure of human modification of terrestrial lands based on modeling the physical extents of 13 anthropogenic stressors and their estimated impacts using spatially explicit global datasets with a median year of 2016. We quantified the degree of land modification and the amount and spatial configuration of low modified lands (i.e., natural areas relatively free from human alteration) across all ecoregions and biomes. We identified that fewer unmodified lands remain than previously reported and that most of the world is in a state of intermediate modification, with 52% of ecoregions classified as moderately modified. Given that these moderately modified ecoregions fall within critical land use thresholds, we propose that they warrant elevated attention and require proactive spatial planning to maintain biodiversity and ecosystem function before important environmental values are lost.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/560f713bdf00699cb09406c44ac987dfee2ba8c9
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In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Biodiversity impacts and conservation implications of urban land expansion projected to 2050 (2022, positive): “To examine the level of human modi fi cation of land covers, we use the global human modi fi cation (gHM) layer, developed by Kennedy et al. (44).”
- People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years (2021, background): “This is partly because previous global reconstructions of early populations and land use systematically ignored these earlier transformations (1, 5, 14) and partly due to the conservation community’s focus on recent industrial changes (2, 3, 9, 15).”