Understanding mammal avoidance of human settlements

Anthropogenic land conversion is putting increasing pressure on wildlife populations around the world. To mitigate impacts, it is necessary to develop a detailed mechanistic understanding of how animals are affected by different types of human activity. A key challenge is to disentangle the effects of static infrastructure, like roads or buildings, and the presence of humans in the landscape. To address this question, we examined if terrestrial mammals altered their movement behaviour around buildings in response to reduced human mobility during COVID-19 lockdowns. We compiled GPS tracking data from 35 study sites across five continents, for 10 carnivore species and 13 herbivore species, totalling >1 million location records from 586 individuals. For each study, we used integrated step selection analysis to test the extent to which animals changed their avoidance of buildings as lockdown took effect, leveraging the recently released Microsoft MLBuildings dataset of global building locations. Analysis of population-level effects revealed that, in areas with high Human Footprint Index (HFI), animals tended to show a significant reduction in their avoidance of buildings during lockdown, but not in low HFI areas. No such trend was detected during equivalent periods in years other than 2020, indicating that behavioural changes were a result of reduced human mobility during lockdowns. Overall, our findings suggest that animals living alongside humans exhibit greater plasticity when people change their behaviour, likely indicating the combined effects of environmental filtering and habituation. More generally, our study provides a critical first step towards developing evidence-based tools for forecasting how wildlife movement behaviour may change in response to different land-use strategies, human activities, conservation interventions or environmental perturbations.

University of California, Berkeley
University of Washington
Grand Teton National Park
University of Wisconsin, Madison
University of California, Santa Barbara
University of Utah
University of Wyoming
Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research
Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute
Instituto de Conservação de Animais Silvestres
Parks Canada
Michigan State University
University of Idaho
United States Fish and Wildlife Service
Royal Zoological Society of Scotland
Swansea University
Office Français de la Biodiversité
University of Montana
Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade
Senckenberg Biodiversität und Klima Forschungszentrum
Université Savoie Mont Blanc
University of St Andrews
Koç University
University of California, Santa Cruz
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
University of Michigan
Iowa State University
University of Oslo
Goethe Universität Frankfurt
Radboud University Nijmegen
Norwegian Institute for Nature Research
University of Sheffield
Colorado State University
Universite de Montpellier
Fondazione Edmund Mach
Université de Toulouse
University of Ljubljana
Wageningen University & Research
Aarhus University
Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro
Instituto de Pesquisas Ecologicas
Czech University of Life Sciences Prague
National Biodiversity Future Center
Yale University
University of Pretoria
Leibniz-Institut für Zoo- und Wildtierforschung