Abstract
Understanding the spatial and temporal patterns of human pressures provides a foundation for understanding interactions between human and environment and managing human activities for a sustainable development. This study is the first attempt focused within China at calculating the spatial–temporal human footprint and its driving forces in a highly urbanized area with intensive human activities. Population, land use, night-time lights, and road impacts were used to generate human footprint maps of Jiangsu Province for 2000, 2010 and 2015 with a resolution of 1 km * 1 km. Five natural drivers and four anthropogenic drivers were employed to construct generalized additive models for explaining the spatial variation of human footprint and its change. It shows that a large difference is between the human footprint in northern and southern Jiangsu, and the pattern of human pressures conforms to the “Matthew effect”, with spatial aggregation of high human footprint areas accelerating. Slope, industrialization level are significant in explaining the spatial variation of human footprint in 2000, 2010 and 2015. The effect of natural drivers decreases for explaining the human footprint over time. Furthermore, annual precipitation, mean annual temperature and urban per capita disposable income are also significant drivers for human footprint in 2010 and 2015. And the increasing of human footprint slows with increasing of industrialization level. The difference of industrialization level and urban income between northern and southern Jiangsu mainly caused different driving pattern for human footprint and its change. Our study has generated new insights on the interaction pattern between human and nature in highly developed regions based on the human footprint concept, and can provide references for managing human activities in similar regions rapid socioeconomic development.
Highlights
Humans are irreversibly changing the physical environment that supports them, for the sake of rapid development of human society[1,2,3]
Assessing spatial–temporal variation of human footprint in rapidly urbanizing areas, and understanding its anthropogenic and natural drivers will help us find the key areas of conflicts between social development and nature environment protection, and provide guidance for managing human activities for a balance between natural environment with socio-economic development
The spatial pattern of human footprint conforms to the “Matthew effect”, with spatial aggregation of high human footprint areas accelerating the increase. (b) The accumulation of deviance explained (ADE) of Generalized additive models (GAM) using the significant natural and anthropogenic drivers are 88%, 93%, 97% and 97.2% for human footprint in 2000, 2010, 2015 and the change of human footprint from 2000 to 2015, respectively
Summary
Humans are irreversibly changing the physical environment that supports them, for the sake of rapid development of human society[1,2,3]. The concept of the human footprint was first proposed by Sanderson, et al in 2002 It expresses human pressures as the sum of a continuum of human influence stretched across the land surface, revealing through its variation the major patterns of human influences on nature. Based on this concept, Sanderson, et al (2002) generated the first global human footprint map, and the concept has since been applied in many other studies. With application of the human footprint concept, many researchers produced human footprint maps at regional scales[17,19] These studies mainly focused on ecosystems with largely natural landscapes, such as Tibet[20], and natural conversation d istricts[21]. The objectives of this paper are to (1) examine the spatial–temporal variation of human footprint in Jiangsu Province for a time period of 2000–2015, and (2) understand the anthropogenic and natural drivers of human footprint in Jiangsu Province
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