A vision for incorporating human mobility in the study of human-wildlife interactions
Diego Ellis Soto, Yale University, diego.ellissoto@yale.edu (Presenter)
Ruth Yvonne Oliver, Columbia University, ryo2101@columbia.edu
Christian Rutz, University of St Andrews, cr68@st-andrews.ac.uk
Walter Jetz, Yale University, walter.jetz@yale.edu
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. While there is increasing realization that both components of human activity significantly affect wildlife, capturing more dynamic processes in ecological studies has proved challenging. Here, we propose a novel conceptual framework for developing a ‘Dynamic Human Footprint’ that explicitly incorporates human mobility, providing a key link between anthropogenic stressors and ecological impacts. 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 behavior, 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.
Associated Project(s):
Poster Location ID: 1-61
Presentation Type: Poster
Session: Poster Session 1
Session Date: Tue (May 9) 5:00-7:00 PM
CCE Program: BDEC