Antarctica more widely impacted by humans than previously thought
Only 16% of the continent's Important Bird Areas are located within
negligibly impacted areas

Date:
July 17, 2020
Source:
University of the Witwatersrand
Summary:
Using a data set of 2.7 million human activity records, the team
showed just how extensive human use of Antarctica has been over
the last 200 years.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== Antarctica is considered one of the Earth's largest, most pristine
remaining wildernesses. Yet since its formal discovery 200 years ago, the continent has seen accelerating and potentially impactful human activity.


==========================================================================
How widespread this activity is across the continent has never been
quantified.

We know Antarctica has no cities, agriculture or industry. But we have
never had a good idea of where humans have been, how much of the continent remains untouched or largely unimpacted, and to what extent these largely unimpacted areas serve to protect biodiversity.

A team of researchers led by Monash University, including Dr Bernard
Coetzee from the Global Change Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Wits University), has changed all of
that. Using a data set of 2.7 million human activity records, the team
showed just how extensive human use of Antarctica has been over the last
200 years. The research was published in the journal Nature.

With the exception of some large areas mostly in the central parts of
the continent, humans have set foot almost everywhere.

Although many of these visited areas have only been negligibly affected
by people, biodiversity is not as well represented within them as it
should be.

"We mapped 2.7 million human activity records from 1819 to 2018 across the Antarctic continent to assess the extent of wilderness areas remaining
and its overlap with the continent's biodiversity," says Coetzee,
a conservation scientist at Wits University. Based in Skukuza in the
Kruger National Park in South Africa, Coetzee helped conceptualise the
study and collated a spatial database from multiple sources to map the
extent of human activity in Antarctica.



==========================================================================
"In a region often thought of as remote, we showed that in fact human
activity has been extensive, especially in ice-free and coastal areas
where most of its biodiversity is found. This means that "wilderness"
areas do not capture many of the continent's important biodiversity
sites, but that an opportunity exists to conserve the last of the wild."
The study found that only 16% of the continent's Important Bird Areas,
areas identified internationally as critical for bird conservation,
are located within negligibly impacted areas, and little of the total negligibly impacted area is represented in Antarctica's Specially
Protected Area network.

High human impact areas, for example some areas where people build
research stations or visit for tourism, often overlap with areas important
for biodiversity.

Lead author, Rachel Leihy, a PhD student in the Monash School of
Biological Sciences, points out that "While the situation does not look promising initially, the outcomes show that much opportunity exists to
take swift action to declare new protected areas for the conservation of
both wilderness and biodiversity." "Informatics approaches using large
data sets are providing new quantitative insights into questions that
have long proven thorny for environmental policymakers," says Steven
Chown, the corresponding author based at Monash University.

"This work offers innovative ways to help the Antarctic Treaty
Parties take forward measures to secure Antarctica's Wilderness."
The transdisciplinary team delivering this work includes researchers
from Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and South Africa.


========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by University_of_the_Witwatersrand. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Rachel I. Leihy, Bernard W. T. Coetzee, Fraser Morgan, Ben Raymond,
Justine D. Shaw, Aleks Terauds, Kees Bastmeijer, Steven L. Chown.

Antarctica's wilderness fails to capture continent's biodiversity.

Nature, 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2506-3 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200717120155.htm

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