Fewer humans and cars, less noise: the lockdown introduced during the Covid crisis has offered a unique opportunity to study how our activities affect the movement of wild animals. Three years later, an international study published Thursday, June 8 in the journal Science draws findings from this life-size experiment.
Led by Marlee Tucker, an ecologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, teams of researchers from around the world have gathered their monitoring data from 43 species of terrestrial mammals. The comings and goings of wildebeest, elephants, wild donkeys, deer or gazelles – a total of 2,300 individuals permanently equipped with GPS collars – were observed between February 1 and May 15, 2020. This information was compared with the data recorded the previous year at the same time.
See alsoAn unprecedented study to measure the impact of confinement on wildlife
The scientists examined two variables related to the behavior of wild animals: the length of their movements...
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