Abstract
Wilderness areas, defined as areas free of industrial scale activities and other human pressures which result in significant biophysical disturbance, are important for biodiversity conservation and sustaining the key ecological processes underpinning planetary life-support systems. Despite their importance, wilderness areas are being rapidly eroded in extent and fragmented. Here we present the most up-to-date temporally inter-comparable maps of global terrestrial wilderness areas, which are essential for monitoring changes in their extent, and for proactively planning conservation interventions to ensure their preservation. Using maps of human pressure on the natural environment for 1993 and 2009, we identified wilderness as all ‘pressure free’ lands with a contiguous area >10,000 km2. These places are likely operating in a natural state and represent the most intact habitats globally. We then created a regionally representative map of wilderness following the well-established ‘Last of the Wild’ methodology; which identifies the 10% area with the lowest human pressure within each of Earth’s 60 biogeographic realms, and identifies the ten largest contiguous areas, along with all contiguous areas >10,000 km2.
Highlights
Background & SummaryWilderness areas are ecologically intact landscapes free of human pressures which cause significant biophysical disturbance of the natural environment[1,2]
Following the original Human Footprint methodology[17], individual pressures were placed within a 0–10 scale based on their estimated contribution to human pressure, and summed giving a cumulative score ranging from 0–50 for each pixel
Comparable maps of pressure free lands for 1993 and 2009 We created two global maps of wilderness in 1993 and 2009 by identifying all areas which are free of human pressure (Human Footprint = 0), and have a contiguous area >10,000 km[2]
Summary
Background & SummaryWilderness areas are ecologically intact landscapes free of human pressures which cause significant biophysical disturbance of the natural environment[1,2]. Wilderness areas are ecologically intact landscapes free of human pressures which cause significant biophysical disturbance of the natural environment[1,2].
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