What happens in the vast stretches of the world's oceans - both wondrous and worrisome - has too often been out of sight, out of mind. The sea represents the last major scientific frontier on planet earth - a place where expeditions continue to discover not only new species, but even new phyla. The role of these species in the ecosystem, where they sit in the tree of life, and how they respond to environmental changes really do constitute mysteries of the deep. Despite technological advances that now allow people to access, exploit or affect nearly all parts of the ocean, we still understand very little of the ocean's biodiversity and how it is changing under our influence. The goal of the research presented here is to estimate and visualize, for the first time, the global impact humans are having on the ocean's ecosystems. Our analysis, published in Science, February 15, 2008 (http://doi.org/10.1126/science.1149345), shows that over 40% of the world's oceans are heavily affected by human activities and few if any areas remain untouched. This dataset contains transformed stressor data from 17 different human activities that directly or indirectly have an impact on the ecological communities in the ocean's ecosystems. The transformed data contains log[X+1]-transformed and rescaled indices between 0-1 for each activity. This transformation to puts each stressor activity on a single, unitless scale that allows direct comparison.

This dataset contains the index, from global design firm Arcadis and the Centre for Economics and Business Research, ranks cities’ success based on social, environmental, and economic factors.

Arcadis used 32 indicators and a cross section of the world’s urban areas, so not all capitals or large cities are necessarily represented. A city is scored on each of the three sustainability factors; its overall score is the average of those.

What happens in the vast stretches of the world's oceans - both wondrous and worrisome - has too often been out of sight, out of mind. The sea represents the last major scientific frontier on planet earth - a place where expeditions continue to discover not only new species, but even new phyla. The role of these species in the ecosystem, where they sit in the tree of life, and how they respond to environmental changes really do constitute mysteries of the deep. Despite technological advances that now allow people to access, exploit or affect nearly all parts of the ocean, we still understand very little of the ocean's biodiversity and how it is changing under our influence. The goal of the research presented here is to estimate and visualize, for the first time, the global impact humans are having on the ocean's ecosystems. Our analysis, published in Science, February 15, 2008 (http://doi.org/10.1126/science.1149345), shows that over 40% of the world's oceans are heavily affected by human activities and few if any areas remain untouched. This dataset contains raw stressor data from 17 different human activities that directly or indirectly have an impact on the ecological communities in the ocean's ecosystems. For more information on specific dataset, see the methods section. All data are projected in WGS 1984 Mollweide.

As an inescapable concomitant with the traditional route of economic development, Pakistan has been facing natural resource degradation and pollution problems. The unsavory spectacle of air pollution, water contamination and other macro environmental impacts such as water logging, land degradation and desertification, are on rise. All this, in conjunction with rapid growth in population, have been instrumental to the expanding tentacles of poverty. In order to make an assessment of the environmental problems as a prelude to arrest the pace of degeneration and, provide for sustainable course of economic development, the availability of adequate data is imperative. This publication is an attempt to provide relevant statistics compiled through secondary sources. The task of environmental data collection does not consist just in determining the frame and approaching the selected sources of information because environmental statistics per se do not exist as a ready-to-compile/pick category as generally perceived about data and statistics. The information on environment are generated through deliberate scientific observations and measurements in a consistent way, under the aegis of specialized agencies. Since it is skill and resource intensive pursuit and, generally undertaken in public sector, the overall budgetary/financial constraints do take the toll of the canvas and continuity of environmental data generation down the time lane. Consequently, availability of the statistics falls short of desired level. Further, the studies pertaining to normals over a period of time are repeated after long time intervals which may not conform with the quinquennial periodicity of this document. Similarly, a lot of variables antecedental, associated with and, consequential to, environment are derived from population census which is yet to be carried out even though the stipulated decennial time frame has long been overstepped. Nevertheless, the latest update of the compendium is a good attempt to mirror quite a few environmental factors as a means to raise awareness and help stay focus on the pivotality of environmental concerns for instituting sustainable development paradigm-the only way forward to ensuring the continuity of human race on the face of planet earth.

Leading up to the 2020 Convention on Biological Diversity there is momentum around setting bold conservation targets. Yet it remains unclear how much of Earth's land area remains without significant human influence and where this land is located. We compare four recent global maps of human influences across Earth's land, Anthromes, Global Human Modification, Human Footprint, and Low Impact Areas, to answer these questions. Despite using various methodologies and data, these different spatial assessments independently estimate similar percentages of the Earth's terrestrial surface as having very low (20-34%) and low (48-56%) human influence. Three out of four spatial assessments agree on 46% of the non-permanent ice- or snow-covered land as having low human influence. However, much of the very low and low influence portions of the planet are comprised of cold (e.g., boreal forests, montane grasslands and tundra) or arid (e.g., deserts) landscapes. Only four biomes (boreal forests, deserts, temperate coniferous forests and tundra) have a majority of datasets agreeing that at least half of their area has very low human influence. More concerning, <1% of temperate grasslands, tropical coniferous forests and tropical dry forests have very low human influence across most datasets, and tropical grasslands, mangroves and montane grasslands also have <1% land identified as very low influence across all datasets. These findings suggest that about half of Earth's terrestrial surface has relatively low human influence and offers opportunities for proactive conservation actions to retain the last intact ecosystems on the planet. However, though the relative abundance of ecosystem areas with low human influence varies widely by biome, conserving these last intact areas should be a high priority before they are completely lost.

What happens in the vast stretches of the world's oceans - both wondrous and worrisome - has too often been out of sight, out of mind. The sea represents the last major scientific frontier on planet earth - a place where expeditions continue to discover not only new species, but even new phyla. The role of these species in the ecosystem, where they sit in the tree of life, and how they respond to environmental changes really do constitute mysteries of the deep. Despite technological advances that now allow people to access, exploit or affect nearly all parts of the ocean, we still understand very little of the ocean's biodiversity and how it is changing under our influence. The goal of the research presented here is to estimate and visualize, for the first time, the global impact humans are having on the ocean's ecosystems. Our analysis, published in Science, February 15, 2008 (http://doi.org/10.1126/science.1149345), shows that over 40% of the world's oceans are heavily affected by human activities and few if any areas remain untouched. Global data for marine ecosystems are largely non-existent; here we used available data for several ecosystems, modeled the distribution of many other ecosystems, and assumed a uniform distribution for several intertidal ecosystems for which no data exist. We recognize that differences exist in how people classify ecosystems; for example, estuaries are often considered an ecosystem, but here we focus on the ecosystems (also often labeled ‘habitats’) that occur within estuaries (salt marsh, intertidal mud, beach, soft sediment, mangroves, etc.). All ecosystem data were represented at 1 km2 resolution. This dataset contains maps for 20 distinct marine ecosystems used in the impacts model. More information on data sources can be found in the methods section.

What happens in the vast stretches of the world's oceans - both wondrous and worrisome - has too often been out of sight, out of mind. The sea represents the last major scientific frontier on planet earth - a place where expeditions continue to discover not only new species, but even new phyla. The role of these species in the ecosystem, where they sit in the tree of life, and how they respond to environmental changes really do constitute mysteries of the deep. Despite technological advances that now allow people to access, exploit or affect nearly all parts of the ocean, we still understand very little of the ocean's biodiversity and how it is changing under our influence. The goal of the research presented here is to estimate and visualize, for the first time, the global impact humans are having on the ocean's ecosystems. Our analysis, published in Science, February 15, 2008 (http://doi.org/10.1126/science.1149345), shows that over 40% of the world's oceans are heavily affected by human activities and few if any areas remain untouched. The top level of this dataset contains the raster data for the modeled impacts map, along with a high resolution jpg version. Sub-levels of this dataset include: raw stressor data, transformed stressor data (raw data is log(x+1) transformed and rescaled by dividing by maximum global value so values range from 0-1), and ecosystem data. All spatial data are projected in WGS 1984 Mollweide.

The images acquired by SPOT Earth observation satellites are an unparalleled source of information for studying, monitoring, forecasting and managing natural resources and human activities on our planet. The SPOT archives have more than 10 million images covering almost the whole surface of the Earth several times over. Each image covers a wide area (60 km x 60 km) and comes in a full range of resolutions from 20 m down to 2.5 m. They can be directly integrated in image processing, geographic information or map-making systems. They are easy to process and combine with other geographic data to extract whatever information may be needed.