Moving in the Anthropocene: Global reductions in terrestrial mammalian movements
By M. Tucker, K. Böhning‐Gaese, William F. Fagan, J. Fryxell, B. van Moorter, S. Alberts, Abdullahi H. Ali, Andrew M. Allen, N. Attias, Tal Avgar and 105 more. Science, 2018
1,095 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Restrictions on roaming Until the past century or so, the movement of wild animals was relatively unrestricted, and their travels contributed substantially to ecological processes. As humans have increasingly altered natural habitats, natural animal movements have been restricted. Tucker et al. examined GPS locations for more than 50 species. In general, animal movements were shorter in areas with high human impact, likely owing to changed behaviors and physical limitations. Besides affecting the species themselves, such changes could have wider effects by limiting the movement of nutrients and altering ecological interactions. Science, this issue p. 466 Human alterations of the landscape shorten the distances traveled by individual animals. 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.
Subfields: Ecology, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b61897cfc5e3ae33ed81b3f961417347626125dc
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In Ecology
- Mark Hebblewhite
- Evelyn H. Merrill
- K. Böhning‐Gaese
- D. Bowler
- J. Cabral
- M. Winter
- Anne E. Magurran
- M. Dornelas
In Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
Citations in the corpus
- The challenges and opportunities of coexisting with wild ungulates in the human-dominated landscapes of Europe's Anthropocene (2019, neutral): “A wide range of telemetry studies conducted during the last 40 years have demonstrated how mobile these species can be (Tucker et al., 2018).”
- Prevalence and Mechanisms of Partial Migration in Ungulates (2019, background): “…frequency-dependence, condition, review INTRODUCTION Dramatic declines in populations of migratory ungulates and the disappearance of migratory behavior in many ungulate species are now recognized as a global conservation challenge (Berger, 2004; Bolger et al., 2008; Tucker et al., 2018).”
- Mapping human pressures on biodiversity across the planet uncovers anthropogenic threat complexes (2020, background): “The intensity of the terrestrial human footprint has been linked with spatial variation in ecological processes; for instance reduced animal movement was found in areas with a higher human footprint across different species (Tucker et al., 2018).”