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 to identify intact and modified lands and ecosystems. 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 which 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% under high human footprint. A validation of the final map resulted in a Cohen Kappa statistic of 0.911, 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.

Identifying differences in roadless areas in Canada based on global, national, and regional road datasets

“…Minor‐ and low‐use roads can also provide access to previously inaccessible regions, inducing the growth of further infrastructure and natural resource exploitation (Johnson et al, 2020; Laurance et al, 2014). The lack of inclusion of resource extraction routes and other low‐use roads in less‐developed regions of Canada thus represents a major drawback to the use of global‐ or national‐scale datasets for accurately representing the road network and road‐free regions across the country (see Hirsh‐Pearson et al [in press], for example).…”

Areas Important for Ecological Connectivity Throughout Canada

“…We used a wall-to-wall, omnidirectional version of circuit theory with nodes placed in buffers outside of the area of interest, allowing for the assessment of connectivity across an entire landscape independent of source and destination nodes 18,20 . We were also fortunate to have access to the input layers for the new Canadian Human Footprint 42 and a new, more comprehensive national road layer. Those resources allowed us to generate a national cost surface specific for connectivity analyses, with only a few cost categories that we are confident were accurately ranked relative to each other.…”

“…We developed a movement cost surface for Canada by combining landcover layers from 16 sources. Eight of those layers were from the Canadian Human Footprint (CHF) 42 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 43 that included resource-access roads, along with a national railway layer.…”

Transformational changes for achieving the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework ecological connectivity goals

“…Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo had the largest losses of primary tropical forest in 2020 (Weisse and Goldman n.d.). In Canada, the boreal forest region is experiencing significant forest loss from mining and forestry activities, as well as fires resulting from anthropogenic climate change (Watson et al 2016;Hirsh-Pearson et al 2022). While much of northern Canada includes large, intact, and carbon-rich areas (Venter et al 2016;Carroll and Ray 2020) that are de facto connected by virtue of its relatively undisturbed land cover at present (Robertson et al 2017), there are no measures to keep it that way, and the northward expansion of mining, energy development, forestry, tourism, and associated roads is already evident (Watson et al 2016;Hirsh-Pearson et al 2022).…”