Satellite map shows the impact of humans on Earth over 20 years

The coronavirus pandemic has forced researchers to switch to other work or temporarily abandon

projects due to health safety protocolsor inability to travel. But for Patrick Keyes and Elizabeth Barnes, a husband-and-wife team of Colorado State University (CSU) scientists, the past year has been a rewarding one. That's because they teamed up with Neil Carter, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, to work on an article published in the journalEnvironmental Research Letters. In it, the authors of the study talk about the creation of a satellite map of anthropogenic impact on the regions of the planet.

Scientists have used machine learning tocreating an atlas that shows exactly where in the world there have been dramatic changes in the landscape. The map shows the impacts of deforestation, mining, expansion of road networks, urbanization and agricultural growth.

Human Footprint Index (HFI) - Wideused as a tool to interpret humanity's increasing pressure on the Earth. Until now, the process of creating the HFI has required significant data and modeling, and updated versions of the index are often many years behind the times. In the new work, the scientists presented a machine learning-based global HFI (ml-HFI) that can be regularly updated using only satellite imagery. In the study, the scientists presented the latest HFI map and documented changes in human impact on nature over the past 20 years (2000 to 2019). 

Countries marked with a green outline reachprogress towards SDG 15. Insert panels provide examples of increasing human pressure and corresponding features used by CNNs to identify human activity. Courtesy: Environmental Research Letters(2021). DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/abe00a

“The map we have developed can help peopleunderstand the important issues of biodiversity conservation and sustainability in general, ”said Keyes, Lead Author and Research Fellow at CSU's School of Global Environmental Sustainability.

This type of card can be used fortracking progress towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 15 (SDG 15) “Life on Earth”, which aims to conserve biodiversity.

Human Footprint Index (HFI), a measurement of human impact on a landscape on a scale of 0 to 1. Courtesy:Environmental Research Letters(2021). DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/abe00a

For their map, the researchers created a convolutionalneural network (CNN), which is commonly used to interpret images. This is similar to how Facebook works, where the site asks you to tag friends in a photo. 

When developing the algorithm, scientists usedexisting data that has classified human impacts on the planet. We are talking about factors such as roads and buildings, as well as pastures for livestock and deforestation sites. The convolutional neural network then learned to accurately interpret satellite images based on this existing data. 

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