Three centuries of human impact: A comprehensive framework for assessing landscape dynamics and environmental...

The Anthropocene has ushered in a new era where human activities surpass natural processes as the primary drivers of environmental change. Understanding long-term dynamics of human impact, landscape evolution, and environmental consequences is critical for addressing these shifts. This study investigates 300 years of human activity changes and their effects on landscape transformations in the Dongting Lake Basin, providing a historical perspective on anthropogenic environmental impacts. We used a multi-scale geographically weighted regression to investigate the drivers of landscape evolution, with carbon effects as a case study of their environmental impact. The past three centuries witnessed a nearly universal transformation in the Dongting Lake Basin, where severe fragmentation, regularization, and reduced connectivity impacted over 90% of the region. Anthropogenic factors are key drivers of landscape evolution, with significant interconnections effects between basin landscape pattern evolution and the intensity of human activities, positively correlated with the Fragmentation Index and Regularity Index, and negatively correlated with the Connectivity Index. The carbon effects of landscape evolution indicate that landscape patterns characterized by high fragmentation (-0.086) and low connectivity (0.605) lead to greater carbon loss, with the impacts of fragmentation and connectivity on carbon stocks being more significant. The "Degraded Landscape" pattern leads to greater carbon loss, while the "Ideal Landscape Structure" has the opposite effect. Our findings highlight the need to incorporate sustainable landscapes into carbon policies, especially with increasing human activities.