Sixteen years of change in the global terrestrial human footprint and implications for biodiversity conservation

By O. Venter, E. Sanderson, Ainhoa Magrach, J. Allan, Jutta Beher, Kendall R. Jones, Hugh P. Possingham, W. Laurance, Peter Wood, Balazs M. Fekete and 2 more. Nature Communications, 2016

1,661 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Human pressures on the environment are changing spatially and temporally, with profound implications for the planet’s biodiversity and human economies. Here we use recently available data on infrastructure, land cover and human access into natural areas to construct a globally standardized measure of the cumulative human footprint on the terrestrial environment at 1 km2 resolution from 1993 to 2009. We note that while the human population has increased by 23% and the world economy has grown 153%, the human footprint has increased by just 9%. Still, 75% the planet’s land surface is experiencing measurable human pressures. Moreover, pressures are perversely intense, widespread and rapidly intensifying in places with high biodiversity. Encouragingly, we discover decreases in environmental pressures in the wealthiest countries and those with strong control of corruption. Clearly the human footprint on Earth is changing, yet there are still opportunities for conservation gains. Habitat loss and urbanization are primary components of human impact on the environment. Here, Venter et al.use global data on infrastructure, agriculture, and urbanization to show that the human footprint is growing slower than the human population, but footprints are increasing in biodiverse regions.

Subfields: Ecology, Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f1d202e987396786c1d1095bbff31ac97172e671

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Citations in the corpus

Spatiotemporal Evaluation of The Human Footprint in Colombia: Four Decades of Anthropic Impact in Highly Biodiverse Ecosystems (2020, methodology): “To achieve this, it is key to understand spatiotemporal patterns of human impact on natural systems, an issue addressed by a number of studies (Etter et al., 2011; Sanderson et al., 2002; Venter et al., 2016; Woolmer et al., 2008).”
The challenges and opportunities of coexisting with wild ungulates in the human-dominated landscapes of Europe's Anthropocene (2019, neutral): “The drivers of change are diverse, but include the following: (1) Changing human pressure on the landscape through infrastructure development (transport, recreation, renewable energy production, Venter et al., 2016).”
Geographical, temporal and taxonomic biases in insect GBIF data on biodiversity and extinction (2021, background): “Therefore, the proposal of Rocha-Ortega et al. (2020) to use traits like body mass, breeding habitat and temperature tolerance can be another way to assess the insect response to the accelerated rate of deterioration of the environment (Reid et al., 2016; Venter et al., 2016).”
Large carnivore expansion in Europe is associated with human population density and land cover changes (2021, background): “Second, human population density data are modelled products, which are deemed suitable for large-scale analyses of human impact (e.g. Venter et al., 2016).”
Mapping human pressures on biodiversity across the planet uncovers anthropogenic threat complexes (2020, methodology): “These maps have estimated that at least 75% of terrestrial land has been exposed to some sort of land-use change (Venter et al., 2016) with only 23.2% classified as wilderness (Watson et al., 2016).”
EXIOBASE 3: Developing a Time Series of Detailed Environmentally Extended Multi‐Regional Input‐Output Tables (2018, methodology): “Productive, but unused, land was derived from previous estimates (Potapov et al. 2017; Venter et al. 2016), and estimated values for the time period were constructed using linear interpolations (see supporting information S6 on the Web).”
Moving in the Anthropocene: Global reductions in terrestrial mammalian movements (2018, background): “Human Footprint Unitless 1993-2009 mean 1 km Global terrestrial Human Footprint maps for 1993 and 2009 (8, 17) Log_10”
Extinction risk and threats to plants and fungi (2020, background): “In contrast, the increasing availability of land cover data facilitates assessments citing threats associated with land use change, such as expansion or intensification of farming or residential and commercial development (Venter et al., 2016).”
Primate responses to anthropogenic habitat disturbance: A pantropical meta-analysis (2017, background): “Given that the human footprint continues to expand relentlessly, particularly into the most species-rich biomes (Venter et al., 2016), the fate of biodiversity will increasingly rely primarily on human-modified habitats.”
The exceptional value of intact forest ecosystems (2018, background): “This is mediated by: (1) increased levels of human accessibility; (2) successive cycles of logging of often progressively lower value trees113; (3) increased hunting pressure5; (4) forest clearance and fragmentation due to colonization by farmers and loggers facilitated by new roads114; and (5) the ”