Collaborative conservation zoning with human footprint index integration: A case study of Haixi Prefecture, Tibetan Plateau

With the rapid development of the Tibetan Plateau, various human activities have increasingly extended into ecologically vulnerable areas with low‐intensity human disturbance, leading to aggravated habitat fragmentation. This poses severe challenges to ecological conservation efforts on the plateau. Therefore, incorporating diverse human activity factors into the planning of plateau ecological reserves to formulate proactive and quantitative conservation plans has become an issue that warrants urgent investigation. 'This study integrates land use/land cover, climate, GDP and human footprint data to quantify ecosystem services, model biodiversity distributions and optimize spatial conservation zones using a combined InVEST‐MaxEnt‐Marxan model. It calculates grid‐based carbon stocks for planning units, simulates biodiversity distribution, identifies key environmental variables, constructs four distinct cost objective functions and optimizes diverse conservation planning scenarios. The study established four cost‐based scenario cases using Haixi Prefecture as the experimental area: Case 1 (single‐dimensional natural factors), Case 2 (single‐dimensional socioeconomic factors), Case 3 (multi‐dimensional GDP and human footprint weighting) and Case 4 (integrated natural, socioeconomic and human footprint weighting). Based on comparative analysis of the experimental results, the ‘ecological‐economic’ synergistic development scheme demonstrated significant advantages. Integrating human activity footprint data into the ecological conservation planning of the Tibetan Plateau enables more precise identification of the spatial distribution of areas with high‐intensity human disturbance. By avoiding such areas in conservation planning, originally isolated ecological patches can be reconnected, thereby mitigating the ‘ecological island’ effect—referring to fragmented, isolated habitats severed by human activities. Meanwhile, human footprint data can quantify the degree of anthropogenic disturbance in each grid cell, allowing grids with low disturbance and high ecological value to be designated as priority conservation zones, thus enhancing the precision of planning. Synthesis and applications . This study confirms that integrating human footprint data enhances the practical applicability and ecological connectivity of plateau conservation planning. The ‘ecological‐economic’ synergistic scheme, with fewer units, high irreplaceability overlap and good connectivity, offers direct references for Haixi Prefecture and similar plateau regions. The combined InVEST‐MaxEnt‐Marxan model also provides a replicable tool for spatiotemporal data‐driven conservation planning in ecologically sensitive areas.