Overview
- A multinational team used the COVID-19 mobility slowdown to separate short-term human presence from long-term landscape change and measured animal responses during 2019–2020.
- The peer-reviewed study published May 21 analyzed about 11.8 million GPS locations from roughly 4,581 tracked individuals across 37 bird and mammal species and matched them to anonymized, weekly cellphone counts.
- For roughly two-thirds of the species studied, human presence changed weekly range size or the breadth of habitats they used, with some animals expanding space and others contracting it.
- Effects of people often interacted with landscape modification and were typically stronger in less-developed places, meaning parks and wildlands can be more sensitive to short-term human activity than highly developed areas.
- Authors note limits to the study—it focuses on animals large enough for GPS tags and does not link behavior shifts to survival or reproduction—and recommend testing management actions like targeted, time-limited access restrictions.