Anthropause Opportunities: Experimental Perturbation of Road Traffic and the Potential Effects on Wildlife

Sarah E Perkins,Wendy Collinson,Fraser Shilling

doi:10.3389/fevo.2022.833129

Abstract

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic severely reduced many human activities. So pronounced was the change, it has given rise to the term “anthropause”: the considerable alteration of modern human activities. Among these was surface transportation, with prolonged traffic reductions, in excess, of 50% in many countries. Roads and traffic are responsible for functionally fragmenting ecosystems, wildlife populations, and species interactions. The unintentional “dialing-down” of traffic has given continuous monitoring systems of wildlife-vehicle conflict a unique opportunity to study the consequences of perturbing this source of wildlife disturbance and mortality. Experimental manipulation of traffic at the global scale would not have been possible without mitigation responses to SARS-CoV-2. Such a perturbation allows robust empirical investigation into wildlife responses to traffic, including changes in mortality, behavior, genetic connectivity, and knock-on ecosystem effects, the responses to which can be replicated across a global network of wildlife-vehicle conflict monitoring systems. We review the extent to which these extensive data-collection systems provide the primary source of data to study many of these responses, providing the raw material to understand some striking wildlife consequences of the anthropause.

Highlights

Major roads split the Earth’s terrestrial surface into ∼ 600,000 patches, of which more than half are < 1 km2 in area (Ibisch et al, 2016)
∼1.4 billion vehicles and such high numbers begs the question, “what effect(s) do cars have on vertebrate ecology?” This is hard to answer because, as Paine’s classic experiments have taught us, to determine the nature of ecological interactions either the system or interactions must be perturbed (Paine, 1966)
Pisaster spp. from rocky shores in Makkaw (Washington, United States) and in doing so revealed ecological dynamics [keystone species (Paine, 1966) and trophic cascades (Paine, 1969)] that are a crucial part of species interactions, but which were not visible without perturbation

Summary

Introduction

Major roads split the Earth’s terrestrial surface into ∼ 600,000 patches, of which more than half are < 1 km2 in area (Ibisch et al, 2016). The anthropause enabled a unique opportunity for the greatest natural experiment of our time in terms of assessing anthropogenic effects on ecological systems (Bates et al, 2020), and so provides the chance to examine how traffic affects wildlife, using fundamental principles of experimental ecology.

Results

Conclusion