Abstract: Human activities threaten the rare and endangered wildlife in nature reserves. Satellite remote sensing technology has advantages of high accuracy and objectivity in monitoring human activities in nature reserves. Tencent is the largest messaging and social media platform in China, with broad coverage. Tencent user density (TUD) dataset is thus a useful proxy of dynamic population distribution with the advantages of real-time and efficient. In this study, we identified the artificially disturbed landscapes in the national and provincial nature reserves in Guangdong Province in 2015 and 2019 based on the high-resolution remote sensing images. We quantitatively evaluated the spatiotemporal variations of the artificially disturbed landscapes in the nature reserves using a disturbance intensity index. We further used TUD data for comparison and verification. The results showed that: (1) The intensity of human disturbance in the nature reserves was not high in general. The spatial distribution was uneven, with a high intensity in the northeast and a low intensity in the southwest. (2) From 2015 to 2019, the disturbance index of human decreased by 81.8%. The intensity of human disturbance was relatively strong in the areas with good geographical conditions in terrain and traffic. The higher the proportion of basic farmland and population density, the greater the intensity was. (3) The evaluation results of human disturbance intensity were consistent with the TUD data. The higher the human disturbance intensity, the higher the TUD was. Nature reserves in urban areas and with tourism development had higher TUD.

Key words: nature reserve, human disturbance intensity, high-resolution satellite image, Tencent user density, Guangdong.