ArticleScientific reports2023
Partial COVID-19 closure of a national park reveals negative influence of low-impact recreation on wildlife spatiotemporal ecology.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The Human Shield Hypothesis: Does Predator Avoidance of Humans Create Refuges for Prey?Ecology letters · 2025Pooled it
- Needle in a Forest: Searching for Thresholds to Maximize Coexistence Between People and Wildlife in a Remote Wilderness Park.Biology · 2026Article
- Wildlife responses to nonmotorized recreation in the Southern Canadian Rockies: a multiscale analysis near Fernie, BC.Journal of mammalogy · 2026Article
- Hunting and Outdoor Recreation Affect Large Herbivore Activity Patterns More Than Natural Predators in a Human-Dominated Landscape.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Impacts of Tourism on Wild Elephant Behavior in a Protected Area: Thresholds for Sustainable Wildlife Viewing.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- The influence of human presence and footprint on animal space use in US national parks.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- White-tailed deer limit their spatio-temporal overlap with hikers in a protected area.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Breaking the Barrier: SARS-CoV-2 Infections in Wild and Companion Animals and Their Implications for Public Health.Viruses · 2024Review
- Weather-dependent changes in habitat use by Alpine chamois.Movement ecology · 2024Article
- When and where? Day-night alterations in wild boar space use captured by a generalized additive mixed model.PeerJ · 2024Article
- Urbanization, climate and species traits shape mammal communities from local to continental scales.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Lockdown's Silver Lining? Different Levels of Roadkill during the COVID-19 Times in Lithuania.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human presence exerts complex effects on the ecology of species, which has implications for biodiversity persistence in protected areas experiencing increasing human recreation levels. However, the difficulty of separating the effect on species of human presence from other environmental or disturbance gradients remains a challenge. The cessation of human activity that occurred with COVID-19 restrictions provides a 'natural experiment' to better understand the influence of human presence on wildlife. Here, we use a COVID-19 closure within a heavily visited and highly protected national park (Glacier National Park, MT, USA) to examine how 'low-impact' recreational hiking affects the spatiotemporal ecology of a diverse mammal community. Based on data collected from camera traps when the park was closed and then subsequently open to recreation, we found consistent negative responses to human recreation across most of our assemblage of 24 species, with fewer detections, reduced site use, and decreased daytime activity. Our results suggest that the dual mandates of national parks and protected areas to conserve biodiversity and promote recreation have potential to be in conflict, even for presumably innocuous recreational activities. There is an urgent need to understand the fitness consequences of these spatiotemporal changes to inform management decisions in protected areas.
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Registered trials
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