Data for detailed temporal mapping of global human modification from 1990 to 2017

Data on the extent, patterns, and trends of human land use are critically important to support global and national priorities for conservation and sustainable development. To inform these issues, we created a series of detailed global datasets for 1990, 2000, 2010, 2015, and 2017 to evaluate temporal and spatial trends of land use modification of terrestrial lands (excluding Antarctica). Our novel datasets are detailed (0.09 km2 resolution), temporally consistent (for 1990-2015), comprehensive (11 change stressors, 14 current), robust (using an established framework and incorporating classification errors and parameter uncertainty), and strongly validated. We also provide a dataset for ~2017 with 14 stressors for an even more comprehensive dataset. Also provided is a land/water mask to support subsequent analyses.

Please note that the 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2015 change datasets for v1.4 data provide important updates -- analyses that used previous change datasets (i.e. v1-1.3) should be re-run using these most recent data. Datasets for v1.4 now rely on a 300 m resolution human intrusion layer, rather than the 1000 m resolution used previously. This is provided because we found a non-linear scaling in the resistance values used to calculate human intrusion, such that more detailed linear features such as roads were averaged out when upscaled from 300 m to 1000 m. This more detailed representation of transportation infrastructure (at 300 m) resulted in human accessibility to be greater, resulting in higher estimates of human modification to be detected in the v1.4 results. 

Revised statistics for v1.4 show that the percent change between 1990 and 2015 was 30.3% or 1.2% annually -- about 359 km2 daily or nearly 25 ha min-1.

For more details on the methods, please see: Theobald, D. M., Kennedy, C., Chen, B., Oakleaf, J., Baruch-Mordo, S., and Kiesecker, J.: Earth transformed: detailed mapping of global human modification from 1990 to 2017, Earth Syst. Sci. Data., https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2019-252, 2020

Detailed global datasets for 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2015 for land use modification of terrestrial lands (excluding Antarctica) are provided here. These data were calculated using the degree of human modification approach that combines the proportion of a pixel of a given stressor (i.e. footprint) times the intensity of that stressor (ranging from 0 to 1.0). Our novel datasets are detailed (0.09 km2 resolution), temporally consistent (for 1990-2015), comprehensive (11 change stressors, 14 current), robust (using an established framework and incorporating classification errors and parameter uncertainty), and strongly validated. We also provide a dataset for ~2017 with 14 stressors for an even more comprehensive dataset, but it should not be used to calculate change with the other datasets (1990-2015). Also provided is a land/water mask (~2015 conditions) to support subsequent analyses. The file gHM_landLakeReservoirOcean300m.zip provides a land/water mask, and differentiates land, ocean, lakes, and reservoirs to allow subsequent analyses to support subsequent analyses. We also provide 5 datasets representing major stressor groups (i.e. built-up, ag/timber, energy/mining, transportation/corridors, and human intrusion) that are components of the full dataset that contains all stressors.