New Paper: How Wildlife Responded to COVID-19 Lockdowns

Photo: Seattle Urban Carnivore Project

It takes a global community of researchers to shed light on how wildlife responded to COVID-19—and I’m honored to be a co-author on a new paper that achieves just that.

Led by Dr. Cole Burton, a conservation biologist at the University of British Columbia, the ambitious paper (published in Nature Ecology & Evolution) looked at 102 camera-trap projects around the world (including the ones I’m involved in here in Washington) to determine how wildlife responded to changes in human activity during the pandemic. The results indicate which species were most sensitive to human presence and how they tried to adapt. Here is an excerpt from the abstract:

Under higher human activity, mammals were less active in undeveloped areas but unexpectedly more active in developed areas while exhibiting greater nocturnality. Carnivores were most sensitive, showing the strongest decreases in activity and greatest increases in nocturnality. Wildlife managers must consider how habituation and uneven sensitivity across species may cause fundamental differences in human–wildlife interactions along gradients of human influence.

Not surprisingly, this global study has garnered a lot of interest, with associated articles published in The New York Times, Anthropocene magazine, and elsewhere.

Thanks to Cole Burton for his tireless efforts, and also to the myriad other camera-trappers who made this publication possible. I hope our findings can help inform the conservation of wild kin who may not want to encounter us humans at every turn in the trail.