There's plenty of video evidence on social media that wildlife might benefit from lockdown. And while it's been for tragic¹, costly² reasons, we've pushed the pause button on human activity all over the world.

 

社交媒体上有大量的视频证据表明，野生动物可能会从新冠肺炎疫情的封锁中受益。由于这场悲剧的、代价惨重的疫情，我们按下了全世界人类活动的暂停键。

 

On an increasingly crowded planet, wildlife scientists think that this will have some profound effects. The only way to measure that, though, is with lots of bio-loggers.

 

A bio-logger is a small electronic device that can record, store and in some cases automatically relay information, so that information could be positional information - we can find out through satellite tracking where an animal goes and what it's up to.

 

This animation³ shows just how much information those tiny trackers can gather. It shows more than 1500 birds' movements and migrations⁴ logged over a decade.

 

Studying human absence is more tricky⁵, though. One famous study in the Chernobyl exclusion⁶ zone that I visited with scientists last year, has revealed how nature took over a landscape that was abandoned after the nuclear disaster.

 

Now, though, in dozens of ongoing⁷ studies, wildlife researchers have their trackers on species from African elephants to migrating cuckoos, and some of that data has been automatically uploaded throughout lockdown.

 

And so this really is that an unprecedented⁸ opportunity to investigate this relationship between humans and wildlife and we hope that the insights this project will generate will help us to then inform future planning and there are some very specific recommendations that could come out of this.

 

This pause has been at huge human and economic cost, which is why scientists say it's important to maximise what we can learn from lockdown, about how to share the space we have with many other species.

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