Search results for "Human Footprint"
showing 6 items of 6 documents
Assessing environmental conditions of Antarctic footpaths to support management decisions.
2016
Thousands of tourists visit certain Antarctic sites each year, generating a wide variety of environmental impacts. Scientific knowledge of human activities and their impacts can help in the effective design of management measures and impact mitigation. We present a case study from Barrientos Island in which a management measure was originally put in place with the goal of minimizing environmental impacts but resulted in new undesired impacts. Two alternative footpaths used by tourist groups were compared. Both affected extensive moss carpets that cover the middle part of the island and that are very vulnerable to trampling. The first path has been used by tourists and scientists since over …
Female brown bears use areas with infanticide risk in a spatially confined population
2020
Areas used by female brown bears (Ursus arctos) with cubs-of-the-year (hereafter, FCOY) during the first months after den exit are crucial for offspring survival, primarily because of the risk of infanticide by male bears. Therefore, FCOY may avoid areas frequented by adult males during the mating season. The main aim of this study was to identify landscape features (i.e., structure, composition, and human footprint) that may differentiate the habitat use of FCOY in the small bear population of the Cantabrian Mountains (northwestern Spain; 2001–2016) from (a) areas frequented by females with yearlings, because older cubs are at less risk of infanticide than cubs-of-the-year, and (b) bear ma…
Increasing human environmental footprint does not lead to biotic homogenization of forest bird communities in northern USA
2023
Studies have shown negative impacts of increased human pressures on biodiversity at local (alpha-diversity) and regional (gamma-diversity) scales. However, the diversity between local sites (beta-diversity) has received less attention. This is an important shortcoming since beta- diversity acts as a linkage between the local and regional scales. Decreased beta- diversity means that local sites lose their distinctiveness, becoming more similar to each other. This process is known as biotic homogenization. However, the mechanisms causing biotic homogenization have not been fully studied nor its impacts on different facets of biodiversity. We examined if land- use change due to human actions c…
The legacy of human use in Amazonian palm communities along environmental and accessibility gradients
2023
Aim: Palms are iconic and dominant elements of neotropical forests. In the Amazon region, palms have been used and managed by humans for food, material, medicine and other purposes for millennia. It is, however, debated to what extent the structure of modern palm communities reflects long-term human modification. Here, we investigate the complex interplay of ecological and societal factors that influence the distributions of both human-used and non-used palms in western Amazonia. Location: Amazonia. Time period: Present. Major taxa studied: Palms (Arecaceae). Methods: We used Bayesian hierarchical joint species distribution models to predict the distributions and environmental niche dimensi…
Anthropogenic soils are the golden spikes for the Anthropocene
2011
We propose that the Anthropocene be defined as the last c. 2000 years of the late Holocene and characterized on the basis of anthropogenic soils. This contrasts with the original definition of the Anthropocene as the last c. 250 years (since the Industrial Revolution) and more recent proposals that the Anthropocene began some 5000 to 8000 years ago in the early to mid Holocene (the early-Anthropocene hypothesis). Anthropogenic soil horizons, of which several types are recognized, provide extensive terrestrial stratigraphic markers for defining the start of the Anthropocene. The pedosphere is regarded as the best indicator of the rise to dominance of human impacts on the total environment b…
Data from: Moving in the Anthropocene: global reductions in terrestrial mammalian movements
2019
Animal movement is fundamental for ecosystem functioning and species survival, yet the effects of the anthropogenic footprint on animal movements have not been estimated across species. Using a unique GPS-tracking database of 803 individuals across 57 species, we found that movements of mammals in areas with a comparatively high human footprint were on average one-half to one-third the extent of their movements in areas with a low human footprint. We attribute this reduction to behavioral changes of individual animals and to the exclusion of species with long-range movements from areas with higher human impact. Global loss of vagility alters a key ecological trait of animals that affects no…