COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdown as a "Global Human Confinement Experiment" to investigate biodiversity conservation

Abstract

Efforts to curtail the spread of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV2) have led to the unprecedented concurrent confinement of nearly two-thirds of the global population. The large human lockdown and its eventual relaxation can be viewed as a Global Human Confinement Experiment. This experiment is a unique opportunity to identify positive and negative effects of human presence and mobility on a range of natural systems, including wildlife, and protected areas, and to study processes regulating biodiversity and ecosystems. We encourage ecologists, environmental scientists, and resource managers to contribute their observations to efforts aiming to build comprehensive global understanding based on multiple data streams, including anecdotal observations, systematic assessments and quantitative monitoring. We argue that the collective power of combining diverse data will transcend the limited value of the individual data sets and produce unexpected insights. We can also consider the confinement experiment as a "stress test" to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses in the adequacy of existing networks to detect human impacts on natural systems. Doing so will provide evidence for the value of the conservation strategies that are presently in place, and create future networks, observatories and policies that are more adept in protecting biological diversity across the world.

Keywords: COVID-19; Human impacts; Protected areas; Sustainability; Wildlife.

Fig. 1

Time series of the number of humans under confinement across the global population under the 2020 COVID-19 mitigation policies. Data on government responses to COVID-19 across countries and time were retrieved from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (Hale et al., 2020), which also reports where the restrictions on internal movement apply to the whole or part of the country. The global population under confinement of internal movement was calculated by adding up the population of countries where the restriction is general, and 20% of the population of countries where the restriction is targeted, as an estimate of the fraction of the population affected. Population data by country corresponding to year 2020 have been obtained from the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations (, https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/database/index.asp). Note that the data about restrictions contain missing information for some countries and dates. Therefore, the calculated number of human confinement does not take into account the population of countries with missing information and may thus underestimate the actual number of humans under restriction.

Fig. 2

Emerging examples of cascading effects arising from the large-scale confinement of humans. Effects are positive (solid line) or negative (dotted line) where color identifies the causal mechanism of the proposed change, and the arrowhead indicates directionality. Numbers identify examples (legend) of proposed interactions.