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A vision for incorporating human mobility in the study of human–wildlife interactions

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 7, pages 1362–1372 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

As human activities increasingly shape land- and seascapes, understanding human–wildlife interactions is imperative for preserving biodiversity. Habitats are impacted not only by static modifications, such as roads, buildings and other infrastructure, but also by the dynamic movement of people and their vehicles occurring over shorter time scales. Although there is increasing realization that both components of human activity substantially affect wildlife, capturing more dynamic processes in ecological studies has proved challenging. Here we propose a conceptual framework for developing a ‘dynamic human footprint’ that explicitly incorporates human mobility, providing a key link between anthropogenic stressors and ecological impacts across spatiotemporal scales. Specifically, the dynamic human footprint integrates a range of metrics to fully acknowledge the time-varying nature of human activities and to enable scale-appropriate assessments of their impacts on wildlife behaviour, demography and distributions. We review existing terrestrial and marine human-mobility data products and provide a roadmap for how these could be integrated and extended to enable more comprehensive analyses of human impacts on biodiversity in the Anthropocene.

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Fig. 1: Motivation for the development of a dynamic human footprint.
Fig. 2: Measuring the dynamic human footprint.
Fig. 3: Timeline of the availability of different human-activity-data products.
Fig. 4: Constructing the dynamic human footprint.

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Acknowledgements

This article is a contribution of the COVID-19 Bio-Logging Initiative, which is funded in part by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF9881) and the National Geographic Society (NGS-82515R-20) (both grants to C.R.) and endorsed by the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. We thank the members of the initiative’s steering committee as well as N. C. Harris for helpful discussion and feedback. D.E.-S. acknowledges support from NASA FINESST (80NSSC22K1535) and the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies. R.K. acknowledges support from NASA (80NSSC21K1182). This research was supported by the Max Planck-Yale Center for Biodiversity Movement and Global Change and also by the NASA Internet of Animals project through Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory contract 1675801 (support to W.J.). F.C. contributed to this work partly under the IRD Fellowship 2021–2022 at Fondation IMéRA, Institute for Advanced Studies at Aix-Marseille Université.

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Diego Ellis-Soto, Ruth Y. Oliver.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Diego Ellis-Soto, Ruth Y. Oliver, Brett Jesmer & Walter Jetz

  2. Center for Biodiversity and Global Change, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Diego Ellis-Soto, Ruth Y. Oliver, Brett Jesmer & Walter Jetz

  3. Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Ruth Y. Oliver

  4. School of Geography and Sustainable Development, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK

    Vanessa Brum-Bastos & Urška Demšar

  5. Institute of Geodesy and Geoinformatics, Wroclaw University of Environmental Sciences, Wroclaw, Poland

    Vanessa Brum-Bastos

  6. School of Earth and Environment, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

    Vanessa Brum-Bastos

  7. Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

    Brett Jesmer

  8. Department of Geography & Environment, Centre for Animals on the Move, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada

    Jed A. Long

  9. Animal Ecology Unit, Research and Innovation Centre, Fondazione Edmund Mach, San Michele all’Adige, Italy

    Francesca Cagnacci & Federico Ossi

  10. National Biodiversity Future Center S.C.A.R.L., Palermo, Italy

    Francesca Cagnacci

  11. CIBIO, Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos, InBIO Laboratório Associado/BIOPOLIS Program in Genomics, Biodiversity and Land Planning, Universidade do Porto, Vairão, Portugal

    Nuno Queiroz

  12. Marine Biological Association, Plymouth, UK

    Nuno Queiroz & David W. Sims

  13. Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Mark Hindell

  14. Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Mark Hindell

  15. North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Roland Kays

  16. Dept Forestry and Environmental Resources, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Roland Kays

  17. Ecosystem Dynamics and Forest Management Group, TUM School of Life Sciences, Technical University of Munich, Freising, Germany

    Matthias-Claudio Loretto

  18. Berchtesgaden National Park, Berchtesgaden, Germany

    Matthias-Claudio Loretto

  19. Department of Migration, Max-Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Radolfzell, Germany

    Matthias-Claudio Loretto

  20. Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (SBiK‐F), Frankfurt (Main), Germany

    Thomas Mueller

  21. Department of Biological Sciences, Goethe University, Frankfurt (Main), Germany

    Thomas Mueller

  22. Centre for Biological Diversity, School of Biology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK

    Robert Patchett & Christian Rutz

  23. Ocean and Earth Science, National Oceanography Centre Southampton, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

    David W. Sims

  24. Centre for Biological Sciences, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

    David W. Sims

  25. Department of Environmental Science, Radboud Institute for Biological and Environmental Sciences, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Marlee A. Tucker

  26. Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chizé, La Rochelle Université − CNRS, Villiers en Bois, France

    Yan Ropert-Coudert

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  1. Diego Ellis-Soto
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  2. Ruth Y. Oliver
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  3. Vanessa Brum-Bastos
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  4. Urška Demšar
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  8. Federico Ossi
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Contributions

D.E.-S. and R.Y.O. co-conceived and conceptualized the article with significant contributions from C.R. and W.J. and feedback from all co-authors (V.B.-B., U.D., B.J., J.A.L., F.C., F.O., N.Q., M.H., R.K., M.-C.L., T.M., R.P., D.W.S., M.A.T. and Y.R.-C.). D.E.-S. and R.Y.O. led the writing of the article with significant contributions from C.R., input from V.B.-B., J.A.L. and U.D., and feedback from all co-authors. D.E.-S. and R.Y.O. led the development of the figures with input from C.R., W.J., V.B.-B., N.Q., B.J. and R.P. and feedback from all co-authors (V.B.-B., U.D., B.J., J.A.L., F.C., F.O., N.Q., M.H., R.K., M.-C.L., T.M., R.P., D.W.S., M.A.T. and Y.R.-C.). Preparation of the article was coordinated by D.E.-S., R.Y.O., C.R. and W.J. All co-authors approved the submission of the article.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Diego Ellis-Soto or Ruth Y. Oliver.

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Nature Ecology & Evolution thanks Marta Gonzalez, Francesca Verones and James Watson for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Table 1.

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Ellis-Soto, D., Oliver, R.Y., Brum-Bastos, V. et al. A vision for incorporating human mobility in the study of human–wildlife interactions. Nat Ecol Evol 7, 1362–1372 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02125-6

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