Recent Changes to Human Habits May Signal Improved Wildlife Viability

by Carrie Elizabeth Bradon | The Florida Free Press

ORLANDO — Though the results are still inconclusive, local conservationists are working to determine if decreased human activity due to stay-at-home orders has benefited Florida’s wildlife and natural areas.

Patrick Rose, executive director and aquatic biologist at Save The Manatee, highlighted the difficulties in making authoritative claims about the impact of a mere two months of decreased activity.

“As a scientist, you like to have a large enough sample size over a long enough period of time, so that you can draw meaningful conclusions from it,” he told The Florida Free Press. “I would say it’s going to be quite difficult to conclude what the benefits may have been from these more temporary situations.”

While quantitative data points reflecting the impact of decreased human activity on the environment are not yet available, qualitative data is another story.

“It’s a great example of how the resource can potentially benefit from lesser perturbations that are occurring to the system,” Rose said. “It gives you an idea that there is a direct connection between man’s activities and what happens in the resource.”

Rose believes that, in the short term, conditions have improved enough for the animals, sea grasses and other natural resources to enjoy limited benefits.

“In some places, manatees likely did benefit from less people being on the water, but then there were pockets of problems in the higher urban areas, where there was some reckless behavior by boaters,” Rose said. “Once it got to the point where most of those systems were locked down, then I think there were some benefits to the manatees directly.”

According to David Godfrey, executive director of the Sea Turtle Conservancy, there were promising signs of sea turtle activity on the state’s beaches at the height of the stay-at-home restrictions. These trends were potentially related to fewer tourists and boaters in coastal areas, which left turtles undisturbed and unharmed.

“Having a month and a half or longer of almost all boating activity stopped, all of which occurred at the beginning of nesting season — which is when turtles are beginning to accumulate offshore — you are very likely to see decreased numbers of interactions between turtles and boats,” Godfrey told The Florida Free Press.

Godfrey is hopeful that data from the coronavirus lockdown this year will reflect a marked decrease in turtle mortality when compared to previous years, but he emphasized it is still too early to know for certain.

“We will not know anything legitimate until the end of the season, when we can look back at the actual data and see what happened,” he said.

As local governments attempted to enforce stay-at-home orders, police officers took to the beaches to send people home. Godfrey explained that such restrictions have given the conservancy a glimpse of what an undisturbed nesting season may look like.

“No one was walking on the beach at night,” Godfrey said. “Literally, law enforcement was out getting people off the beach. If no one’s allowed to be on the beach and our turtles are starting to arrive, we may actually have a nesting season without all this disturbance by people.”

While tracking conclusive data will require extended time and meticulous measuring, Dr. Jason Evans, interim executive director at Stetson University’s Institute for Water and Environmental Resilience, said that Florida’s natural environment has already enjoyed perceivable benefits.

“I think the most striking change to the environment here in central Florida has been the much lower levels of air pollution due to the greatly reduced automotive traffic and, to a lesser extent, aircraft activity,” Evans told The Florida Free Press. “This is a direct result of decreased human activity.”

These findings are echoed by data from around the world, which suggest that air pollution has decreased by 50 percent in many cities.

According to the World Economic Forum, however, pollution will likely return to pre-lockdown levels as restrictions loosen.

Despite these predictions, local conservationists are optimistic. With new evidence, residents could become aware of their impact on Florida’s natural environment and seek to implement lasting and positive changes.

“I think that these developments toward a much cleaner economy are going to happen on a global scale, and the recovery from the pandemic shock may prove to be the spark that prompts us to make these changes,” Evans said.

This is part of an ongoing series investigating COVID-19’s impact on the state of Florida.