Section Topics In the Wild News Africa Asia Latin America ... The Human Footprint Read the Story Atlas of the Human Footprint Last of the Wild About the Data BACK TO Landscape Ecology Main Page ... About the Research Fellowship Program
Search our Site
About the Data Last updated 6 September 2002 General issues: The maps of the human footprint and of the last of the wild should not be read too literally. Although there is no doubt that the human footprint and last of the wild express an important perspective on the world, it is also true that, in its details, these maps contain inaccuracies (acknowledged below) and are mapped at a scale coarser than most conservation efforts These maps are based on geographic proxies for drivers of human impact: human population density, land cover and land use mapping, lights regularly visible from a satellite at night, locations of roads, rivers and coasts, settlement patterns, etc. However drivers are not inevitably impacts. One of the roles of conservation is to find ways for human beings to lessen their impacts while still making their living. The input datasets used to map the human footprint are enormously expensive to maintain and update, as a result they tend to lag behind the patterns they depict. | |
|
