Research

Connecting Home Ranges and Human Expansion to Conservation Targets

Animal movement is fundamental to the persistence of ecological communities, yet human development increasingly restricts dispersal and limits the space wildlife can use. Recent advances in long-term tracking and movement ecology allow us to characterize home ranges in unprecedented detail, but applying these data to large-scale conservation planning remains challenging, particularly for species or regions with limited data.

Our research predicts how global expansion of the human footprint is altering mammal home ranges through time. Using summarized movement datasets, we estimate human-induced changes in home range size and identify species and regions where habitat degradation poses the greatest risk. We then assess whether species can meet conservation protection targets based on the degree to which their ranges have already been converted to high-intensity human use.

This approach provides a systematic way to link predicted shifts in movement and space use with spatial conservation priorities, enabling us to pinpoint high-risk species and regions and inform planning and monitoring at multiple scales.