At least 97 percent of Earth’s land may no longer be ecologically intact and undisturbed by human presence. The damning statistic comes from a new study published in the journal Frontiers in Forests and Global Change this week.
The term "ecologically intact" has no strict definition, but it generally refers to areas of land that remain undisturbed by human activity and are still as abundant in animal life now as they were before industrialization. For this new study, an international team of scientists compared the natural ranges of thousands of mammal species today compared to the year 1500 CE, a time before the Industrial Revolution.