When wild boar took over the Basilica di San Giovanni gardens in Rome, it was because the park so often used for concerts and civic events had fallen silent during the COVID-19 lockdown. Now, new research into how animals responded when these urban spaces were abandoned offers insight into how changes in human behavior may benefit species in the future.
The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, focused on the movement of 43 species, from elephants in the Welgevonden Game Reserve of South Africa to the wolves and fox tracked by the University of Wisconsin Urban Canid Project in the United States.
Giraffes, bears, deer, cougars—all told, the data came from more than 2,300 individual animals, according to ecologist Marlee Tucker of Radboud University in the Netherlands. Tucker led an international team of 174 researchers on the project, including members of the COVID-19 Bio-Logging Initiative who digitally monitor wildlife as part of conservation efforts.
The animals’ movements during the height of global pandemic lockdowns (from January to May 2020) were then compared with how they had behaved a year earlier. The researchers also looked at variations including how strict a lockdown policy was in Italy, France, or other countries.
“We saw that during strict lockdowns, animals travelled up to 73 percent longer distances in a period of 10 days than the year before, when there were no lockdowns,” said Tucker. “We also saw that animals occurred on average 36 percent closer to roads than the year before. This is probably because those roads were quieter during strict lockdowns.”
On the other hand, people in some parts of the globe were encouraged to get out into the fresh air of their local urban parks and green spaces, which led some animals to stick a little closer to home within their ranges.
“In areas with less strict lockdowns, we saw that animals travelled shorter distances,” said Thomas Mueller of Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre and Goethe University in Frankfurt, who designed the study with Tucker. “This may have to do with the fact that during those lockdowns, people were actually encouraged to go into nature. As a result, some nature areas were busier than before COVID-19.”
The study builds on knowledge from other research that’s been focused on specific species, including the appearance of crested porcupines in Italian neighborhoods and the movements of brown bear who encounter humans in the Eastern Italian Alps.
Yet little has been known previously about how human mobility rather than landscape changes affect animal species. The researchers said they made use of the “quasiexperimental” mobility changes from the COVID lockdowns, which offered a unique opportunity to study the effects of a sudden change in human interactions.
“Our research has shown that animals can respond directly to changes in human behavior,” says Tucker. “This offers hope for the future, because in principle this means that making some adjustments to our own behavior could have a positive effect on animals.”
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