Australia’s terrestrial industrial footprint and ecological intactness

Abstract. Australia's unique biodiversity faces significant threats from anthropogenic activities that drive habitat destruction and degradation. This study presents the first comprehensive national-scale cumulative pressure map for terrestrial Australia since the 1980s, providing key insights into human disturbance of the landscape. We developed a Human Industrial Footprint (HIF) index incorporating 16 nationally relevant pressure layers, offering a more accurate representation of industrial influences than previous global-scale analyses. The HIF was used to derive an Ecological Intactness Index (EII), accounting for habitat quality, fragmentation, and connectivity. A technical validation comparing visually scored pressures in 1397 stratified random samples using high-resolution satellite images revealed a strong agreement with the HIF. We also conducted an uncertainty (sensitivity) analysis by adjusting individual pressure scores by up to ±50 % across 100,000 simulations, which showed a moderate impact on cumulative pressure scores, confirming the robustness of our approach. We believe these high-resolution datasets can be valuable tools for guiding conservation efforts, such as informing protected area expansion, ecosystem restoration priorities, and biodiversity offset strategies. By offering a detailed assessment of cumulative pressures and ecological integrity, this study addresses a critical knowledge gap, and can support evidence-based decision-making for Australia's biodiversity conservation and sustainable development objectives. The HIF, EII, and scaled pressure layers are available at 10.5281/zenodo.15833395 (Venegas-Li et al., 2025).