2023-06-08 20:00:00
Researchers sifted through GPS collar data from 43 species of mammals to see how the Covid crisis had changed their habits.
Fewer humans and cars, less noise: the confinement introduced during the Covid crisis offered a unique opportunity to study how our activities affect the movements of wild animals. Three years later, an international study published Thursday, June 8 in the magazine Science draws conclusions 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, fallow deer or gazelles – in all 2,300 individuals permanently equipped with GPS collars – were thus observed between February 1 and May 15, 2020. This information were compared with the data recorded the previous year at the same period.
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