Dr. Ruth Oliver

Hi, thanks, Laura.

I'm thrilled to be here.

You know, our broadest question is how do humans impact wildlife?

And, you know, humans are a complicated species and we impact animals in various different ways.

And so we were really interested in disentangling how we change habitats through modification versus our actual direct physical presence in those landscapes.

Exactly.

So there's a lot of great ecological theory.

Like we know this, we know that we impact wildlife and there's all these great theories about how that might happen.

Animals might fear us because they think we're predators or they might be attracted to us because we leave out garbage that they might want to exploit for food.

But we actually haven't been able to quantify those impacts on a large scale because we haven't surprisingly had the data on where humans are.

Yeah, so we were using anonymized, aggregated cell phone device counts.

So we're able to look at, over space and time, a sort of relative proportion of how many people are physically present on the landscape.

I do.

It was really surprising to me when we got into this study where I study wildlife.

We have lots of information on where animals are.

But how hard it was to get information on where humans are.

And it's not that it doesn't exist, right?

Because many of us are carrying mobile devices most of the time.

But yeah, you're right.

It's being used to sell us things.