Using satellite data, the new research suggests that 56% of the land on Earth—excluding areas covered in ice and snow—has relatively low human impacts.

But that area is being parsed into ever-shrinking segments. Land with low human impact exists in roughly 990,000 fragments larger than 1 square kilometer, a much higher number than what occurs with natural boundaries of water, rock, and ice. The same area would be broken into just 73,000…