Quantitative evaluation of human activity intensity on the regional ecological impact studies

Human activities and interventions may have various ecological impacts. Quantitative evaluation of human disturbance is critical for analyzing the effect of human activities on the regional ecological environment. Such evaluations are valuable for understanding the driving mechanism of ecological change and regulating of human activities. In addition,information obtained from the evaluation is helpful to prevent or reduce the potential ecological crisis,and useful on regional planning and policymaking. In this paper,we review the quantitative evaluation methods of human activity intensity from the perspective of ecological impacts. We found that a majority of existing studies mainly evaluate the intensity of human activity from two aspects: pressure change and state change. In the aspect of pressure change, weight-based multi-index superposition systems are established to evaluate the intensity of human activities. In the aspect of state change,human activity intensity is evaluated primarily based upon land use change,ecosystem service change,or multi-factor state change.In addition,this study provides detailed descriptions of methods that are widely applied in the evaluation of human activity intensity,such as the human footprint index,karst disturbance index,ecological footprint,and landscape development index. Finally,we discuss the current problems with the quantitative studies of human activity intensity and give our suggestions for the future study.