It's no surprise that human visitation in national parks where wildlife is abundant can disrupt animals' lives and ways of living.
Now, Spartan News Room has reported that a study on how human recreation affects wildlife behavior at Isle Royale National Park in Michigan has discovered alarming news.
What's happening?
Researchers were curious about how human recreation in Isle Royale National Park affected the animals living there, particularly after the park saw an increase of 338% in visitors after 2020.
They studied wolves, snowshoe hares, red foxes, and moose using 156 infrared cameras over multiple years to determine whether the animals changed their habits to accommodate people being in the area.
The study discovered that the more people who showed up at the park, the more these animals changed their behavior, and the greater the tendency to avoid areas where humans were.
The study found, "A major finding was that species space use and activity patterns were altered only on-trail while remaining constant off-trail. This suggests that the influence of human activity occurs mostly on trails."
Why is changing animal behavior concerning?
Hailey Boone, lead author of this study, explained per Spartan News Room, "Even though humans are technically allowed to recreate in the wilderness areas, the fact that they are potentially changing some sort of behavior from animals goes against the federal Wilderness Act."
The Wilderness Act was passed in 1964 to formally designate and protect federal wilderness. Another purpose was to ensure minimally invasive human influences in these areas so local ecosystems were able to change on their own terms.
Human recreation impacting wildlife isn't only harmful to the wildlife. While human activity disrupts animals' natural lives, having too many people around is dangerous to animals and humans alike.
As more people visit national parks, there are more human-wildlife encounters. In some of these encounters, people get too close to animals, causing conflict, which can result in injury or death to humans and wildlife.
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Definitely 👍 Wildlife behavioral changes may also eventually include moving on to other areas due to too much human activity, which could inadvertently put them into contact with even more people, depending on how close to civilization they get, causing further human-wildlife interactions.
What's being done about how human activity affects wildlife in parks?
This study had a few suggestions for dealing with this issue. One suggestion said, "Reducing visitation during peak seasons or redistributing visitation across a season could reduce mammals' responses to recreational activity while continuing to provide for public enjoyment."
So, if visitors go to parks during off-peak times, there's not an overabundance of people, which might help the wildlife. Meanwhile, another similar study suggested limiting human activity to certain areas in parks to offset the problem.
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