Earth transformed: detailed mapping of global human modification from 1990 to 2017

• Main Authors: Theobald, David M., Kennedy, Christina, Chen, Bin, Oakleaf, James, Baruch-Mordo, Sharon, Kiesecker, Joe
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2019-252; https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2019-252/

Data on the extent, patterns, and trends of human land use are critically important to support global and national priorities for conservation and sustainable development. To inform these issues, we created a series of detailed global datasets for 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2015 to evaluate temporal and spatial trends of land use modification of terrestrial lands (excluding Antarctica). We found that the expansion and increase of human modification between 1990 and 2015 resulted in 1.6 M km 2 of natural land lost. The percent change between 1990 and 2015 was 15.2 % or 0.61 % annually – roughly 178 km 2 daily. Over the pause of a deep breath, over 8 football pitches of natural lands were lost (~ 17 per minute). Worrisomely, we found that the global rate of loss has increased over the past 25 years. The greatest loss of natural lands from 1990–2015 occurred in Oceania, Asia, and Europe, and the biomes with the greatest loss were mangroves, tropical & subtropical moist broadleaf forests, and tropical & subtropical dry broadleaf forests. We also created a contemporary (~ 2017) estimate of human modification that included additional stressors and found that globally 14.5 % or 18.5 M km 2 of lands have been completely modified – an area greater than Russia. Our novel datasets are detailed (0.09 km 2 resolution), temporal (1990–2015), recent (~ 2017), comprehensive (11 change stressors, 14 current), robust (using an established framework and incorporating classification errors and parameter uncertainty), and strongly validated. We believe these datasets will support better understanding of the profound transformation wrought by human activities and provide foundational data on the amounts, patterns, and rates of change to inform planning and decision making for environmental mitigation, protection, restoration, and adaptation to climate change. The datasets generated from this work are available at https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.n5tb2rbs1 (Theobald et al., 2020).