Suchergebnisse

The COVID-19 pandemic has likely affected natural systems around the world; the curtailment of human activity has also affected the collection of data needed to identify the indirect effects of this pandemic on natural systems. We describe how the outbreak of COVID-19 disease, and associated stay-at-home orders in four political regions, have affected the quantity and quality of data collected by participants in one volunteer-based bird monitoring project, eBird. The four regions were selected both for their early and prolonged periods of mandated changes to human activity, and because of the high densities of observations collected. We compared the months of April 2020 with April in previous years. The most notable change was in the landscapes in which observations were made: in all but one region human-dominated landscapes were proportionally more common in the data in April 2020, and observations made near the rarer wetland habitat were less prevalent. We also found subtler changes in quantity of data collected, as well as in observer effort within observation periods. Finally, we found that these effects of COVID-19 disease varied across the political units, and thus we conclude that any analyses of eBird data will require region-specific examination of whether there have been any changes to the data collection process during the COVID-19 pandemic that would need to be taken into account. ; Funding for this work came from the Wolf Creek Foundation, The Leon Levy Foundation, The Packard Foundation, and the National Science Foundation [grants ITR-0427914, DBI-0542868, IIS-0612031, ABI-1356308, CCF-1522054, ICR-1927646]. ICR-1927646 funding to Cornell University was through the 2017-2018 Belmont Forum and BiodivERsA joint call for research proposals, under the BiodivScen ERA-Net COFUND program, with financial support from the Academy of Finland (AKA, Univ. Turku: 326327, Univ. Helsinki: 326338), the Swedish Research Council (Formas, SLU: 2018-02440, Lund Univ.: 2018-02441), the Research Council of Norway (Forskningsrådet, NINA: 295767) and the U.S. National Science Foundation. ; Peer reviewed

© Inter-Research 2015. Interpopulation mixing of migratory species at particular stopover and wintering hotspots increases their vulnerability to anthropogenic impacts. Animal associations with human activities at this time of the annual cycle should, therefore, inform management policies. The Gulf of Cadiz, Spain is a key non-breeding area for the Near-Threatened Audouin's gull Ichthyaetus audouinii and the over-abundant lesser black-backed gull Larus fuscus, both of which heavily depend on human fisheries. Here, we used long-term (1990-2013) data on coastal censuses, along with spatially-explicit information on fish landings (2000-2014) and on-board surveys of fishing vessels (2012-2013), to unravel the association of these gulls with human fisheries and evaluate its role in shaping their distribution at this important non-breeding hotspot. Fishing discards from trawlers were extensively used by lesser black-backed gulls, whereas Audouin's gulls apparently benefited from fish aggregations that occurred where purse seines were retrieved. Fishing influence was identified as an important driver of the non-breeding distribution of these gulls, particularly for the lesser black-backed gull, which congregated near main fishing ports. Within this scenario, we speculate that changes in fishing practices, such as those proposed by the upcoming EU Reform of the Common Fisheries Policy that includes a ban on fishing discards, will almost certainly impact the lesser black-backed gull. In contrast, the impact on the Audouin's gull remains unclear and will likely depend on how the proposed ban is implemented. ; Peer Reviewed