Elsevier

Ecological Indicators

Volume 117, October 2020, 106630
Ecological Indicators

Spatiotemporal evaluation of the human footprint in Colombia: Four decades of anthropic impact in highly biodiverse ecosystems

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2020.106630Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Spatiotemporal evaluation of human footprint in Colombia from 1970 to 2015 is provided.

  • We identify the main hotspots of human footprint change in Colombia.

  • A marked increase in human pressure on natural regions of Colombia was detected.

  • Critically Endangered Ecosystems showed a progressive LHFI increase from 1970 to 2015.

  • LHFI is useful for monitoring conservation efforts and human impacts on ecosystems.

Abstract

The maintenance of biodiversity and the capacity of natural systems to provide goods and services for people is affected on different levels by the intensity of human activities on ecosystems. In this study, we apply a Legacy-adjusted Human Footprint Index (LHFI) to evaluate the spatiotemporal variation of anthropic impact in Colombia in 1970, 1990, 2000 and 2015. We identified hotspots of change in LHFI and we evaluated the intensity of anthropic pressures in natural regions and ecosystems. We found that LHFI in Colombia increased between 1970 and 2015. The Andean and Caribbean regions presented the highest levels of anthropic impact, remaining stable over time. Hotspots of change were mainly located in the following regions: Andean (Antioquia, Cauca and Valle del Cauca states), Amazon (Amazonas, parts of Meta, Guaviare and Putumayo states) and Orinoco (Casanare and parts of Meta and Vichada states). In addition, ecosystems that under the IUCN ecosystem risk categories are Critically Endangered (CR) and Vulnerable (VU) were the most affected by a high level of human impact. Spatiotemporal evaluation of the human footprint in Colombia provides new insights about trends in human pressures on ecosystems and constitutes an analytical tool with high potential for harmonizing land use planning and biodiversity conservation.

Introduction

Human pressures on the environment have drastically accelerated since the mid-twentieth century, risking biodiversity and the provision of goods and ecosystem services (Steffen et al., 2015). Direct impacts of human activities on natural systems include habitat loss and degradation (Crooks et al., 2011), fragmentation (Haddad et al., 2015), deforestation (Hansen et al., 2013), extinctions of species (Dirzo et al., 2014) and plastic pollution in marine ecosystems (Eriksen et al., 2014). Consequently, in the last two decades, landscapes that had remained almost free of human impacts suffered a reduction of one tenth of their surface, predominantly in highly biodiverse regions with pervasive socioeconomic inequality (e.g. the Amazon 30% and Central Africa 14%). This trend highlights the need for national and international prompt actions that recognize the conservation value of such areas and to manage them according to the unprecedented threats they face (Watson et al., 2016). To achieve this, it is key to understand spatiotemporal patterns of human impact on natural systems, an issue addressed by a number of studies (Etter et al., 2011, Venter et al., 2016, Woolmer et al., 2008, Sanderson et al., 2002).

One of the first indicators of human impacts on ecosystems was the Human Footprint Index (HFI, -Sanderson et al., 2002). HFI originally uses four spatial layers (population density, land transformation, accessibility and electric power infrastructure) but it has been modified to include more information (i.e. Woolmer et al., 2008 included mine sites and Leu et al., 2008 incorporated risk of exotic species invasion or anthropogenic fires). All HF indices are synthetic indicators that can be estimated at different scales depending on the homogeneity of the available information (Woolmer et al., 2008). In fact, HFI has been estimated globally to understand the human impact on the world's biomes (Sanderson, 2013, Venter et al., 2016, Sanderson et al., 2002) and regionally (Tapia-Armijos et al., 2017, Trombulak et al., 2010, Woolmer et al., 2008) or nationally (in Colombia -Etter et al., 2011, in Mexico González-Abraham et al., 2015) to evaluate ecoregions or ecosystems.

Mapping spatiotemporal changes in human footprint reveals places where anthropogenic pressures have increased, decreased or remained stable, as well as, hotspots where impacts are outstanding (Geldmann et al., 2014, Li et al., 2018, Tapia-Armijos et al., 2017, Venter et al., 2016). Recently, HFI was used by Venter et al. (2016) to analyze global human impact changes between 1993 and 2009, while a number of recent studies show the practical use HFI to inform conservation planning (Correa Ayram et al., 2019, Correa Ayram et al., 2017, de Thoisy et al., 2010, Di Marco et al., 2013, Dobrovolski et al., 2013, Trombulak et al., 2010).

The most recent application of this approach for Colombia was proposed by Etter et al. (2011) whose HFI version includes the dimension of land use intensity, along with time of human intervention on ecosystems and their biophysical vulnerability (soil fertility, slope, moisture availability and number of short range species). By combining these three spatial dimensions, authors provided a more integral characterization of human impacts by incorporating historical and ecological contexts; this extended HFI facilitates ecosystem-specific detection of priority areas for conservation planning. In fact, it has already been used for this purpose in highly biodiverse countries, like Colombia (Ocampo-Peñuela and Pimm, 2014), China (Qiu et al., 2015) and México (Correa Ayram et al., 2019, Correa Ayram et al., 2017).

Despite its applicability, the extended HFI aggregates realized and potential human impacts and makes it difficult to compare human pressure in areas with different vulnerability factors. Incorporating vulnerability might undercover trends or patterns of human activities that need to be corrected. Conversely, by incorporating time since disturbance, the extended HFI version explicitly acknowledge that ecosystems might carry legacy effects from past landscape transformation that might not be evident before a tipping point is reached (Gardner et al. 2009).

In the last 50 years, ecosystem transformation in Colombia has been linked to the expansion of productive land and its technological changes in response to trade demands, increase in migration to urban centers, drug trafficking, and the internal armed conflict (Etter et al., 2008). In the last three years, the implementation of peace agreements between the government and the FARC-EP guerrillas has opened previously inaccessible areas, raising concerns about the expansion of deforestation and ecosystem degradation (Clerici et al., 2018, Negret et al., 2017).We offer a vision of human impacts that is as recent as possible, temporarily consistent, and it has a more precise spatial resolution (300 m) than the extended HFI calculated by Etter et al. (2011) or by any other global human footprint maps (e.g. Allan 2017, Venter et al., 2016). Thus, this study provides a trend baseline for monitoring human pressure on biodiversity and for designing prospective approaches (Trombulak et al., 2010).

In this study, we propose modifying the extended HFI (Etter et al., 2011) by only including time of human intervention. By including the cumulative impact of human actions, our Legacy-adjusted HFI (LHFI) provides a more conservative approach than current global HFI approaches (e.g. Venter et al., 2016, Sanderson et al., 2002), allowing the distinction of areas with recent but unprecedented interventions, from areas with a long history of human impact, where legacy effects might be stronger. The objective of this study three-fold: to conduct for the first time a multitemporal analysis of LHFI (1970–2015) for Colombia, to identify the hotspot of human footprint change, and to explore relationships of LHFI with ecosystem risk categories for every ecosystem. In contrast to other studies of human footprint (Li et al., 2018, Tapia-Armijos et al., 2017, Venter et al., 2016, Geldmann et al., 2014), we estimate human impacts in four periods which extends the temporal resolution of any available HFI.

Section snippets

Methods

LHFI was calculated for continental Colombia (Eq.1), one of the most biodiverse countries in the world (Myers et al., 2000). Colombia comprises eight terrestrial biomes (Deserts and Xeric Shrublands, Mangroves, Paramo, Tropical and Subtropical Dry Forests, Tropical and Subtropical Grasslands and Savannas, Shrublands, Tropical and Subtropical Forests and Wetlands -Etter et al., 2017) and it is divided into six biogeographical regions (Andean, Pacific, Caribbean, Amazon, Orinoco and Catatumbo;

Spatiotemporal variation of human footprint

In Colombia, the Legacy-adjusted Human Footprint Index (LHFI) increased 50% between 1970 and 2015 (Fig. 1) and natural areas reduced to less than half of the national territory (for more details see Table A-3 in Appendix 1), although variation is high among regions. The Caribbean and Andean regions, which have the highest population densities showed the highest degree of LHFI, while larger regions with lower population densities (Amazonia, Orinoco and Pacific, with densities of 5 to 17 people /

Discussion

Mapping LHFI at four different periods improved our understanding of how land transformation acting at different spatiotemporal scales translate into a footprint with ecological consequences. First, our results show that regions that have historically promoted productive activities and that have been at the center of Colombia’s development such as the Andean and Caribbean regions, have persistently high LHFI locations (PHHI). These regions also contain highly dynamic areas and this mixture

Conclusions

This study is the first spatiotemporal evaluation of human pressure in Colombia and it provides the first historic examination of where and how different levels of human impact are distributed. By considering time of intervention (TI), our Legacy-adjusted Human Footprint Index (LHFI) allows evaluations over realized human impacts without considering biophysical vulnerability as previously suggested by Etter et al. (2011). Without this dimension, our approach distinguishes areas that show high

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Camilo Andrés Correa Ayram: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Supervision. Andrés Etter: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation. Julián Díaz-Timoté: Conceptualization, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization. Susana Rodríguez Buriticá: Conceptualization,

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the Ministry of the Environment of Colombia for providing financial support to this research (Resolution 0130 of 2018). We recognize the valuable contributions of reviewers who helped improve the manuscript. We also want to thank Julia Premauer for their support in the revision of English version of the manuscript.

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