Sixteen years of change in the global terrestrial human footprint

This study mapped the global human footprint, a composite index of human pressure on land, and tracked its change over time, revealing where pressures intensified and where they eased. The human footprint integrates infrastructure, population, land use, and other factors into a single layer widely used to quantify habitat degradation for wildlife. For wide-ranging cats, the footprint underpins resistance surfaces in connectivity models and indices of habitat condition. It matters as a key dataset for assessing how mounting human pressure constrains felid distributions and corridors, and for identifying the increasingly rare low-footprint areas that serve as strongholds, making it a standard reference layer in land-use change analyses across carnivore conservation.