Open Collections

Description

Abstract

Despite growing evidence of widespread impacts of humans on animal behavior, our understanding of how humans reshape species interactions remains limited. Here, we present a framework that draws on key concepts from behavioral and community ecology to outline four primary pathways by which humans can alter predator-prey spatiotemporal overlap. We suggest that predator-prey dyads can exhibit similar or opposite responses to human activity with distinct outcomes for predator diet, predation rates, population demography, and trophic cascades. We demonstrate how to assess these behavioral response pathways with hypothesis testing, using temporal activity data for 178 predator-prey dyads from published camera trap studies on terrestrial mammals. We found evidence for each of the proposed pathways, revealing multiple patterns of human influence on predator-prey activity and overlap. Our framework and case study highlight current challenges, gaps, and advances in linking human activity to animal behavior change and predator-prey dynamics. By using a hypothesis-driven approach to estimate the potential for altered species interactions, we can anticipate the ecological consequences of human activities on whole communities.

Contains: Temporal activity and functional trait data for 178 predator-prey dyads from 19 published camera trap studies of terrestrial mammals in paired settings of high and low human use. For information on how this dataset was compiled and the included datatypes, please review the enclosed README.md and metadata files. Includes R scripts, which produced Figures 2 and 3 of the case study, to assess how human activity can influence predator-prey activity and overlap.