Human impacts on mammals in and around a protected area before, during, and after COVID‐19 lockdowns

Abstract

The dual mandate for many protected areas (PAs) to simultaneously promote recreation and conserve biodiversity may be hampered by negative effects of recreation on wildlife. However, reports of these effects are not consistent, presenting a knowledge gap that hinders evidence‐based decision‐making. We used camera traps to monitor human activity and terrestrial mammals in Golden Ears Provincial Park and the adjacent University of British Columbia Malcolm Knapp Research Forest near Vancouver, Canada, with the objective of discerning relative effects of various forms of recreation on cougars (Puma concolor), black bears (Ursus americanus), black‐tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus), snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus), coyotes (Canis latrans), and bobcats (Lynx rufus). Additionally, public closures of the study area associated with the COVD‐19 pandemic offered an unprecedented period of human‐exclusion through which to explore these effects. Using Bayesian generalized mixed‐effects models, we detected negative effects of hikers (mean posterior estimate = −0.58, 95% credible interval [CI] −1.09 to −0.12) on weekly bobcat habitat use and negative effects of motorized vehicles (estimate = −0.28, 95% CI −0.61 to −0.05) on weekly black bear habitat use. We also found increased cougar detection rates in the PA during the COVID‐19 closure (estimate = 0.007, 95% CI 0.005 to 0.009), but decreased cougar detection rates (estimate = −0.006, 95% CI −0.009 to −0.003) and increased black‐tailed deer detection rates (estimate = 0.014, 95% CI 0.002 to 0.026) upon reopening of the PA. Our results emphasize that effects of human activity on wildlife habitat use and movement may be species‐ and/or activity‐dependent, and that camera traps can be an invaluable tool for monitoring both wildlife and human activity, collecting data even when public access is barred. Further, we encourage PA managers seeking to promote both biodiversity conservation and recreation to explicitly assess trade‐offs between these two goals in their PAs.

Partial COVID-19 closure of a national park reveals negative influence of low-impact recreation on wildlife spatiotemporal ecology

“…The negative response of mammals to human recreation contrasts with some recent observational work finding highly mixed responses, (i.e., species responding both positively and negatively), to recreation or human presence 9,11,12 but agrees with some other work taking advantage of the COVID-19 lockdown natural experiment 38,39 . Species responding negatively to recreation in our analysis include a mix of large and small carnivores and ungulates.…”

“…The cessation of human activity that occurred with the COVID-19 pandemic has provided an unprecedented opportunity to examine how human activity impacts species mortality, behavior, and habitat use [37][38][39][40] . However, not all human activity is equal, with human presence in many places also associated with other forms of disturbance such as hunting or habitat modification 12 .…”

Mammalian predator and prey responses to recreation and land use across multiple scales provide limited support for the human shield hypothesis

“…A Bayesian framework allowed us to model the relationship between wildlife detections and the magnitude of recreation at both local (individual camera trap stations) and landscape scales (all cameras in a given array), while assessing local-scale impacts of land-use disturbances (roads, logging), similar to approaches used by Rich et al (2017) and Miller and Grant (2015). Our response variable was the number of independent detections per camera station for each focal ungulate F I G U R E 1 Geographical locations of camera arrays in British Columbia and Alberta included in our study: Sooke Capital Regional District (Klees van Bommel, 2022), Golden Ears Provincial Park and Malcolm Knapp Research Forest (Procko et al, 2022), Joffre Lakes Provincial Park, Garibaldi Provincial Park, Sea-to-Sky Mammal Monitoring Project (Dawe et al, Unpublished data), South Chilcotin Mountains (Naidoo & Burton, 2020), Cathedral Provincial Park (Fennell et al, 2022) Kootenay Remote Camera Wildlife Monitoring project (Chow, 2019), Kananaskis Country (Heim et al, 2019) and Yellowhead region (Ladle et al, 2018). Polygons represent minimum convex polygons around all camera stations in each study (buffered by 2 km).…”

Logging, linear features, and human infrastructure shape the spatial dynamics of wolf predation on an ungulate neonate

“…Linear features associated with outdoor recreation activities are generally used infrequently by humans in the GVE, which is probably why wolves showed a strong selection for these features. Our study adds to the growing body of evidence that recreational activities such as riding ATVs/UTVs and hiking can affect wildlife behavior and subsequent predator-prey dynamics in boreal ecosystems (e.g., Naidoo & Burton, 2020;Procko et al, 2022;Sytsma et al, 2022).…”