The Human Impacts Database

A collection of useful numbers for quantifying the impacts of the human presence on Earth.

Fraction of coastal regions under high human pressure

LandUrbanization

This quantity is a single measurement of the quantity at a given point in time (2013).

Value:

This is equivalent to...

≈ 0.479
HuID: 14077
Relevant Year(s): 2013
Summary: Area fraction of coastal regions that were under high anthropogenic pressure as of 2013. The measure of anthropogenic pressure is based on a combination of the human footprint over land (e.g., population density, roadways), and the human impacts on the coastal marine realm (e.g., shipping, pollution, fishing). Coastal regions are defined as regions within 50 km of the coast, following an ecological connectivity perspective.
Method: The authors took the human footprint for the terrestrial realm, and the cumulative human impact map for the marine realm and allocated a point along every 1 km of Earth’s coastline. They then calculated the summed proportion of intact pixels within each 50 km buffer for each point with terrestrial and marine pixels contributing equally to the final intactness value, to create the final coastal region intactness map representing the proportion of each point along the coast that is intact (0-100% intact, divided into five equal bins or “categories” for reporting purposes). High human pressure corresponds to the 0-20% bin. For the terrestrial realm they defined intactness as any pixel under a threshold of <4 from their human pressure scale, representing a reasonable approximation of when anthropogenic land conversion has occurred to an extent that the land can be considered human-dominated and no longer “natural”, and for the marine realm they used any pixel under a threshold of the 40% quantile – and excluding climate change pressures.
Source: Williams, B. A., Watson, J. E.M., Beyer, H. L., Klein, C. J., Montgomery, J., Runting, R. K., Roberson, L. A., Halpern, B. S., Grantham, H. S., Kuempel, C. D., Frazier, M., Venter, O., & Wenger, A. Global rarity of intact coastal regions. Conservation Biology (2022)
Dataset: Intactness of coastal regions (coastal_region_intactness.csv)
global resolution
Original Data License: Some Rights Reserved
Added By: ilopezgo