Influence of Anthropogenic Disturbances on Wildlife Behavior, Reproductive Success, and Population Persistence

Abstract

Human activities now pervade virtually all wilderness areas, and a wealth of evidence demonstrates that non-lethal disturbances, including recreation, roads, noise, and infrastructure development, can have significant impacts on animal behavior, negatively affect reproductive success, and potentially jeopardize the long-term persistence of populations. This review collates global meta-analyses and empirical studies of animal behavior in order to describe the nature of animal responses to humans, potential fitness costs of these responses, and demographic outcomes associated with the costs. Behavioral responses to human disturbance include alteration of patterns of movement, sizes of home ranges, and time of day when activities take place, and more than two-thirds of movement responses are larger than 20%. Nocturnality is increasingly selected in mammal species exposed to human disturbance, and the mean selection ratio is 1.36 in 62 mammal species across six continents. Responses to human presence are costly in terms of fitness, because disturbed large ungulates experience higher levels of predation due to disturbed habitat use; bird species and other taxa show very diverse responses to different types of disturbances at different times and with different life histories.