- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Humans
take up 83 percent of the Earth's land surface to live on, farm, mine or
fish, leaving just a few areas pristine for wildlife, a report issued on
Tuesday said.
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- People also have taken advantage of 98 percent of the
land that can be farmed for rice, wheat or corn, said the report, produced
by scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Columbia
University's Center for International Earth Science Information Network
in New York.
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- Their map, published on the Internet at http://www.wcs.org/humanfootprint,
adds together influences from population density, access from roads and
waterways, electrical power infrastructure, and the area used by cities
and farms.
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- The few remaining wild areas include the northern forests
of Alaska, Canada and Russia; the high plateaus of Tibet and Mongolia;
and much of the Amazon River Basin.
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- "The map of the human footprint is a clear-eyed
view of our influence on the Earth," Eric Sanderson, a landscape ecologist
for the WCS, who led the report, said in a statement.
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- "It provides a way to find opportunities to save
wildlife and wild lands in pristine areas, and also to understand how conservation
in wilderness, countryside, suburbs, and cities are all related."
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