Monitoring the intensity of human impacts on anthropogenic landscape: A mapping case study in Beijing, China

Abstract Optimization of the use of land resources is vital for nature conservation in spatial planning, especially for rapid urbanizing regions. On this regard, China has officially announced the “Major Function Oriented Zone (MFOZ)” plan, which aims to achieve a coordinated regional development by dividing the whole territory into four types of regions (prohibited, restrictive, optimal, and important development regions). In this study, an integrated index of landscape wilderness is proposed and calculated on a standard grid map with consideration of perceived naturalness of land covers, fragmentation effect of traffic network, and distance from human disturbance sources. Different report units (e.g. administrative districts, major function oriented zones) are applied for evaluating the intensity of human impacts in an intensively modified landscape (i.e. Beijing, the capital city of China). Our results show that the average wilderness degree of Beijing has slightly decreased from 2007 to 2015, but with internal variation. The wilderness values of districts located at the mountainous area are generally higher than plain area. A large overlap (over 99%) between high wilderness area and prohibited/restrictive development regions has been observed, and the negative impacts from human disturbances in prohibited/restrictive development regions are much smaller than in optimal/important development regions. However, in the north part of Beijing some relatively wilder areas do not show high congruence with MFOZ plan. The results have proved the applicability of this mapping approach, which can be useful for assisting the implementation of MFOZ plan, especially in a multi-temporal monitoring process.