Moving in the Anthropocene: Global reductions in terrestrial mammalian movements

2018/01/25 by Marlee A. Tucker, Katrin Böhning‐Gaese, William F. Fagan +97 · 2 citations
Environmental Science · Medicine · #Anthropocene #Astrobiology #Biology #Earth science #Environmental ethics #Environmental science #Geography #Geology #Paleontology #Philosophy #Wildlife Ecology and Conservation #Wildlife-Road Interactions and Conservation #Zoonotic diseases and public health

paper · doi:10.1126/science.aam9712

openalex publication_date 2018/01/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

Animal movement is fundamental for ecosystem functioning and species survival, yet the effects of the anthropogenic footprint on animal movements have not been estimated across species. Using a unique GPS-tracking database of 803 individuals across 57 species, we found that movements of mammals in areas with a comparatively high human footprint were on average one-half to one-third the extent of their movements in areas with a low human footprint. We attribute this reduction to behavioral changes of individual animals and to the exclusion of species with long-range movements from areas with higher human impact. Global loss of vagility alters a key ecological trait of animals that affects not only population persistence but also ecosystem processes such as predator-prey interactions, nutrient cycling, and disease transmission.

Citations

• Collinearity: a review of methods to deal with it and a simulation study evaluating their performance
• Spatiotemporal behavioral plasticity of wild boar (Sus scrofa) under contrasting conditions of human pressure: primeval forest and metropolitan area
• Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere
• A protocol for data exploration to avoid common statistical problems
• Population fragmentation and inter‐ecosystem movements of grizzly bears in western Canada and the northern United States
• Global Consequences of Land Use
• Methods to account for spatial autocorrelation in the analysis of species distributional data: a review
• Sixteen years of change in the global terrestrial human footprint and implications for biodiversity conservation
• Consequences of brown bear viewing tourism: A review

Cited by

• Towards Convivial Conservation
• Spanish flu [wikipedia]

Related

• Understanding and predicting animal movements and distributions in the Anthropocene
• Human biomass movement exceeds the biomass movement of all land animals combined
• Animal migration in the Anthropocene: threats and mitigation options
• The influence of human disturbance on wildlife nocturnality
• A decade of movement ecology