The global lockdown to mitigate COVID-19 pandemic health risks has altered human interactions with nature. Here, we report immediate impacts of changes in human activities on wildlife and environmental threats during the early lockdown months of 2020, based on 877 qualitative reports and 332 quantitative assessments from different studies. Hundreds of reports of unusual species observations from around the world suggest that animals quickly responded to the reductions in human presence. However, negative effects of lockdown on conservation also emerged, as confinement resulted in some park officials being unable to perform conservation, restoration and enforcement tasks, resulting in local increases in illegal activities such as hunting. Overall, there is a complex mixture of positive and negative effects of the pandemic lockdown on nature, all of which have the potential to lead to cascading responses which in turn impact wildlife and nature conservation. While the net effect of the lockdown will need to be assessed over years as data becomes available and persistent effects emerge, immediate responses were detected across the world. Thus, initial qualitative and quantitative data arising from this serendipitous global quasi-experimental perturbation highlights the dual role that humans play in threatening and protecting species and ecosystems. Pathways to favorably tilt this delicate balance include reducing impacts and increasing conservation effectiveness.

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Geostatistical data---spatially referenced observations related to some continuous spatial phenomenon---are ubiquitous in ecology and can reveal ecological processes and inform management decisions. However, appropriate models to analyze these data, such as generalized linear mixed effects models (GLMMs) with Gaussian random fields, are often computationally intensive and challenging to implement, interpret, and evaluate. Here, we introduce the R package sdmTMB, which implements predictive-process SPDE- (stochastic partial differential equation) based spatial and spatiotemporal models. Estimation is conducted via maximum marginal likelihood with Template Model Builder (TMB) but can be extended to penalized likelihood or Bayesian inference. We describe the statistical model, illustrate the package's use through two case studies, and compare the functionality, speed, and interface to related software. We highlight advantages of using sdmTMB for this class of models: (1) sdmTMB provides a flexible interface familiar to users of glm(), lme4, glmmTMB, or mgcv; (2) estimation is often faster than alternatives; (3) sdmTMB provides simple out-of-sample cross validation; (4) non-stationary processes (time-varying and spatially varying coefficients) are easily constructed with a formula interface; and (5) sdmTMB includes features not available as a combination in related packages (e.g., penalized smoothers and break-point effects, anisotropy, abundance index standardization). We hope that sdmTMB's user-friendly interface will open this useful class of models to a wider audience within species distribution modelling and beyond.

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Warming worse in already warmer temperate waters: a meta-analysis of the impact of climate trends and velocities on species of demersal marine shes Impacts of climate velocity on demersal sh biomass depend on initial climate conditions: a metaanalysis across species in the northeast Pacic

Phenology match–mismatch usually refers to the extent of an organism's ability to match reproduction with peaks in food availability, but when mismatch occurs, it may indicate a response to another selective pressure. We assess the value of matching reproductive timing to multiple selective pressures for a migratory lunarphilic aerial insectivore bird, the whip‐poor‐will (Antrostomus vociferus). We hypothesize that a whip‐poor‐will's response to shifts in local phenology may be constrained by long annual migrations and a foraging mode that is dependent on both benign weather and the availability of moonlight. To test this, we monitored daily nest survival and overall reproductive success relative to food availability and moon phase in the northern part of whip‐poor‐will's breeding range. We found that moth abundance, and potentially temperature and moonlight, may all have a positive influence on daily chick survival rates and that the lowest chick survival rates for the period between hatching and fledging occurred when hatch was mismatched with both moths and moonlight. However, rather than breeding too late for peak moth abundance, the average first brood hatch date actually preceded the peak moth abundance and occurred during a period with slightly higher available moonlight than the period of peak food abundance. As a result, a low individual survival rate was partially compensated for by initiating more nesting attempts. This suggests that nightjars were able to adjust their breeding phenology in such a way that the costs of mismatch with food supply were at least partially balanced by a longer breeding season.