The International Bio-Logging Society, together with several partner organizations, has launched the COVID-19 Bio-Logging Initiative to investigate global wildlife responses to altered levels of human activity during the pandemic. The ultimate goal of the Initiative is to use bio-logging data collected before, during, and after the COVID-19 lockdown to advance our understanding of human–wildlife interactions and to inform global efforts to foster sustainable human–wildlife coexistence. We have outlined our vision for this work programme on “anthropause” effects in a recent open-access comment article.
Following an open call for collaboration, we now have a global consortium of >600 partners investigating how animals responded to pandemic lockdowns, which is now endorsed as a UN Ocean Decade project. In a remarkable collaborative effort, the community has pooled >1 billion location fixes for ~13,000 tagged animals across ~200 terrestrial, aerial, and aquatic species in shared bio-logging databases, such as Movebank, enabling the launch of a rich portfolio of coordinated sub-projects.
