What is human footprint? The ABMI defines it as the visible conversion of native ecosystems to temporary or permanent residential, recreational, agricultural, or industrial landscapes. A lot of human footprint is obvious: parking lots, roads, buildings, and so on. But city parks, agricultural fields, and even forests in the process of regenerating after logging, also count as ‘visible transformations’ of the native ecosystem that used to be there.
As of 2015, total human footprint occupied 29.2% of Alberta. The largest contributor to the total was agriculture, which occupied 20.2% of the province, followed by forestry footprint at 4.3% and energy footprint at 1.9%. Furthermore, human footprint was dynamic: between 1999 and 2015, it increased by 3.5% of Alberta’s land base—an area 3.5 times the size of Banff National Park, largely driven by the creation of new forestry footprint.