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Crowded mountains: Long-term effects of human outdoor recreation on a community of wild mammals monitored with systematic camera trapping

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Abstract

Outdoor recreation in natural areas has become an increasingly popular activity globally, yet the long-term effects on wildlife are poorly known. Reconciling human access to nature and wildlife conservation requires sound evaluations of how outdoor activities affect biodiversity in space and time. We aimed to contribute to this topic by asking whether tourism in the world-renown Dolomites, Italy, affected wild mammals in the long term, and if it elicited spatial or temporal avoidance. We detected mammals by systematic camera trapping over seven consecutive summers at 60, consistently sampled, sites, and estimated trends in occurrence at community and species levels through a dynamic community occupancy model, combined with site use intensity and an index of nocturnality. Overall, 70% of the 520 000 images obtained depicted humans, whose presence intensified over the 7-year period. Nonetheless, both community and most species-level occurrences increased. However, human activities caused a strong temporal avoidance in the whole community, especially in most disturbed sites, while spatial avoidance was observed only for bigger-sized species.

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  1. http://www.territorio.provincia.tn.it.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Forest and Wildlife Service of the Autonomous Province of Trento and the Adamello-Brenta Natural Park for the fruitful collaboration offered for the study. Funding came from the Autonomous Province of Trento through a formal agreement with MUSE - Museo delle Scienze. We are grateful to the following staff of these institutions and other people for their help in the field: Renato Rizzoli, Yuri Valler, Marzia Pin, Massimo Vettorazzi, Gilberto Volcan, Enrico Dorigatti, Matteo Zeni, Michele Zeni, Simone Tenan, Luca Roner, Giulia Bombieri. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

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Funding was provided by Provincia Autonoma di Trento.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, University of Firenze, Via Madonna del Piano, 6, 50019, Sesto Fiorentino, Italy

    Marco Salvatori & Francesco Rovero

  2. MUSE - Science Museum of Trento, Corso del Lavoro e della Scienza, 3, 38122, Trento, Italy

    Marco Salvatori, Valentina Oberosler, Margherita Rinaldi, Alessandro Franceschini, Stefania Truschi, Paolo Pedrini & Francesco Rovero

  3. Ente di Gestione per i Parchi e la Biodiversità Emilia Occidentale, Piazza Ferrari, 5, 43013, Langhirano, Italy

    Margherita Rinaldi

  4. Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta, 116 St. and 85 Ave, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2R3, Canada

    Alessandro Franceschini

  5. Wildlife Initiative Italia, Via Rovigo, 12, Pederobba, Italy

    Alessandro Franceschini

  6. Department of Agricultural, Food, Environmental and Forestry Science, University of Firenze, Piazzale delle Cascine, 18, 50144, Florence, Italy

    Stefania Truschi

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Salvatori, M., Oberosler, V., Rinaldi, M. et al. Crowded mountains: Long-term effects of human outdoor recreation on a community of wild mammals monitored with systematic camera trapping. Ambio 52, 1085–1097 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-022-01825-w

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