Dr. Ruth Oliver

And it largely is not readily available for research applications.

Yeah, we do.

We're at this really exciting moment where we're able to put tracking devices on animals that can collect really detailed information on their movements.

And there's so much power in that because we're able to understand how they respond in real time and adjust their behaviors and how they use habitats that can help us understand the mechanisms by which they get into trouble and eventually lead to population declines.

I think the most striking thing from our paper is yes, human presence has a large impact on a large proportion of the species we studied.

But what was really interesting from our results were that in general, animals responded more strongly to humans in less developed areas.

Um, and this maybe isn't totally surprising because, uh, it may be that those animals are less habituated to being around humans.

Um, but what it really means is that, um,

The way that we've been approaching this in the past, just looking at habitat modification, is not enough to understand our impacts as a whole.

Yeah.

So, for example, we see that cougars shrink the amount of space that they use as the density of humans goes up, as more humans are present on the landscape.

But they shrink it by even more when they're in a less developed area than a more developed area.

Yeah, exactly.

An interesting exception to that were gray wolves who actually expanded the amount of area that they used.

And again, expanded it even more in rural areas.

And we don't know totally why that is, but gray wolves have this really long history of persecution in North America.

And so it could be that they're especially sensitive to humans and are having to cover even more ground to accomplish their sort of daily activities to avoid us.

Absolutely.

I think one of the things that we're most excited about from the study is that it gives us optimism that there are other conservation interventions that we could make that could help wildlife.

You know, we've seen these big patterns of species going into decline.