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From the beginning of time, man has contributed to environmental changes of the earth, Human Footprint.We have global warming, population growth, and an increase of both water and energy usage.This has caused a tremendous impact on our environment to the extent that both animals and plants have had to adapt.Today we need to assess what has happen so that we as humans can modify our behavior.

This page is designed to inform you how to serve as a facilitator directing students how to complete a unit entitled, Human Footprint. There are links to the left illustrating a lesson plan and a concept map.

A Landfill

Reduce, reuse, recycle
Buy fewer things
When yyou do need to buy somthing, buy it used.
Pay attention to packaging
Buy recycled items
Buy items that can be recycled
Recycle it

These references serve as additional internet resources regarding the human footprint:

These organisms share a common threat: human impact, usually in the form of habitat destruction, eradication efforts, overharvesting, and the introduction of invasive species. Though conservationists have long been concerned about the impact of human activity, a lack of quantifiable data has historically hampered efforts to achieve conservation goals.

“I’m convinced that we’re in a weird paradox,” said Marc Levy, co-project scientist at the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) at Columbia University. “The international community has finally started taking sustainable development seriously, but now ecosystem preservation is fading into the background. While we’ve had clear, quantitative targets set for poverty reduction, literacy, and health care, biodiversity benchmarks have been very vague.”

Now, Sanderson, Levy, and collaborators have taken an important step in resolving that vagueness. They have produced two complementary global maps: The Human Footprint and The Last of the Wild.

Until recently, compiling global maps of human influence simply wasn’t possible, but the 1990s brought substantial technological advances. Satellite data facilitated the production of global land use and land cover maps, and geographic information systems allowed researchers to integrate satellite and population data efficiently. Using these technologies, Sanderson and his collaborators chose four types of data to measure human influence: population density, land transformation, human access, and power infrastructure.

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Increased human population often leads to greater influence on the environment and sharper declines in species and ecosystems. According to the authors of the human footprint study, however, land transformation probably poses the single greatest threat to biodiversity, resulting in habitat loss and/or fragmentation for wild species. Beyond its effects on the nearby area, it can have global consequences, such as worldwide changes in soils and increased demand for fresh water for irrigation.

The Human Footprint: A Global Environmental History, Second Edition, presents a multidisciplinary global history of Earth from its origins to the present day. Provides a comprehensive, global, multidisciplinary history of the planet from its earliest origins to the present era. Applied Biosystems instruments, assays, and reagents have been trusted in the lab for over 20 years. Researchers use Applied Biosystems integrated systems for sequencing, flow cytometry, and real-time, digital and end point PCR—from sample prep to data analysis. Check out the most popular Applied Biosystems products for genetic analysis.

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The authors also found that the greater the human access through roads, rivers, and coastlines, the greater the likelihood of resource extraction, pollution, and the introduction of invasive species. Both human access and land transformation have been fueled by increased power infrastructure (access to fossil fuel and electrical power) over the last century. Throughout most of human history, impact on the environment was constrained by raw human and animal muscle power. But today, one person with a bulldozer can match the power of 300 horses.

The researchers measured these four variables using nine data sets, assigning each locality a numerical value between 0 (minimum) and 10 (maximum). Next, they summed the scores for all the data sets. Brownsville, Texas, was the only area to reach the maximum score for human influence on the environment, though most of the world’s largest cities fell within the top 10 percent. Sanderson and his collaborators found that 83 percent of Earth’s land surface (98 percent where rice, wheat, or maize can be cultivated) is directly influenced by human activity. “But different ecosystems respond to human activity in different ways,” said Sanderson. To account for these differences, the scores needed refinement.

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Biologists have divided the terrestrial portions of the Earth into biomes, regions characterized by specific climatic conditions and by certain types of life, especially vegetation. For each biome, as defined by the World Wildlife Fund - U.S. Conservation Science Program, Sanderson and his collaborators mapped the original scores to a new scale of 0 to 100. (Because each biome has an independent scale, a score of 50 in a desert might indicate a very different level of human influence than the same score in a grassland environment.) The resulting human footprint is a quantitative measurement of humanity’s impact on the Earth’s land surfaces.