Human Footprint Difference 1993-2009 (Terrestrial)

The Human Footprint (HFP) provides a measure of the direct and indirect human pressures on the environment globally in years 1993 and 2009. It is derived from remotely-sensed and bottom-up survey information compiled on eight measured variables. This represents not only the most current information of its type, but also the first temporally-consistent set of Human Footprint maps. Data on human pressures were acquired or developed for: 1) built environments, 2) population density, 3) electric infrastructure, 4) crop lands, 5) pasture lands, 6) roads, 7) railways, and 8) navigable waterways. Pressures were then overlaid to create the standardized Human Footprint maps for all non-Antarctic land areas. The Human Footprint maps find a range of uses as proxies for human disturbance of natural systems and can provide an increased understanding of the human pressures that drive macro-ecological patterns, as well as for tracking environmental change and informing conservation science and application. HFP values range from 0 (no human impact) to 50 (heavily human impacted).

See: Venter, O. et al., 2016. Sixteen years of change in the global terrestrial human footprint and implications for biodiversity conservation. Nature Communications, 7, pp.1–11 [https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12558].

Data can also be downloaded from Dryad [https://datadryad.org/resource/doi:10.5061/dryad.052q5].