Canada’s human footprint reveals large intact areas juxtaposed against areas under immense anthropogenic pressure

Abstract

Efforts are underway in Canada to set aside terrestrial lands for conservation, thereby protecting them from anthropogenic pressures. Here we produce the first Canadian human footprint map by combining 12 different anthropogenic pressures and identifying intact and modified lands and ecosystems across the country. Our results showed strong spatial variation in pressures across the country, with just 18% of Canada experiencing measurable human pressure. However, some ecosystems are experiencing very high pressure, such as the Great Lakes Plains and Prairies national ecological areas that have over 75% and 56% of their areas, respectively, with a high human footprint. In contrast, the Arctic and Northern Mountains have less than 0.02% and 0.2%, respectively, of their extent under high human footprint. A validation of the final map, using random statistical sampling, resulted in a Cohen Kappa statistic of 0.91, signifying an “almost perfect” agreement between the human footprint and the validation data set. By increasing the number and accuracy of mapped pressures, our map demonstrates much more widespread pressures in Canada than were indicated by previous global mapping efforts, demonstrating the value in specific national data applications. Ecological areas with immense anthropogenic pressure highlight challenges that may arise when planning for ecologically representative protected areas.

Predicting areas important for ecological connectivity throughout Canada

“…We constructed our cost surface by combining land cover layers from 23 sources. Eight of those layers were from the Canadian Human Footprint (CHF) [ 36 ] and included built environments, nighttime lights, croplands, pasturelands, dams and reservoirs, mining, oil and gas, and forestry areas. We used a recently developed national road layer for Canada [ 37 ] that includes resource-access roads, along with a national railway layer.…”

Prioritizing taxa for genetic reference database development to advance inland water conservation

“…Following (Sanderson et al, 2002), each metric was scaled between 0 and 10, weighted to its pressure importance and summed. Canada's human footprint index was calculated following the same protocol, considering 12 pressures which included the global footprint and additional pressures: (9) presence of dams and reservoirs; (10) mining activity; (11) oil and gas; and, ( 12) forestry (Hirsh-Pearson et al, 2022).…”

Using sentinel nodes to evaluate changing connectivity in a protected areas network

“…This approach, which has been used in many other studies, models landscape connectivity based on degree of naturalness or human modification and makes the assumption that more natural landscapes are less costly for many animals to move through and better facilitate ecological processes (Krosby et al, 2015;Spencer et al, 2010;Theobald et al, 2012). Pither et al (2023) built their cost surface using the most up-to-date spatial data layers including the Canadian Human Footprint (Hirsh-Pearson et al, 2022) and an updated national road layer (Poley et al, 2022). We modified the 300-m cost surface of Pither et al (2023) by adding a fifth lowest cost, which we assigned to natural areas within protected area boundaries under the assumption that these areas are less costly to move through than natural areas outside park boundaries (Spencer et al, 2010; Table 1).…”