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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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.
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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.
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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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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02125-6