The influence of human presence and footprint on animal space use in US national parks

Given the importance of protected areas for biodiversity, the growth of visitation to many areas has raised concerns about the effects of humans on wildlife. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic led to temporary closure of national parks in the United States, offering a pseudonatural experiment to tease apart the effects of permanent infrastructure and transient human presence on animals. We compiled GPS tracking data from 229 individuals of 10 mammal species in 14 parks, and used third-order hierarchical Resource Selection Functions to evaluate the influence of the human footprint on animal space use in 2019 and 2020. Averaged across all parks and species, animals avoided the human footprint, whether the park was open or closed. However, while animals in remote areas showed consistent avoidance, on average those in more developed areas switched from avoidance to selection when protected areas were closed. Findings varied across species: some responded consistently negatively to the footprint..., , # Data from: The influence of human presence and footprint on animal space use in US national parks

## Description of the data scripts

### Data files (data.zip)

#### Raw data

##### all-clean-tracks.csv

Movement trajectories of animals, subsampled to a 4-hour fix interval, and filtered according to inclusion criteria described in the supplementary methods of the manuscript. Each row corresponds to a unique GPS location, with associated metadata. Columns include:

* ID_full: unique identifier of individual animal, combining information from columns Park, Species, ID, and Period
* ID: unique identifier of individual animal
* Park: unique identifier of protected area (4-letter NPS code)
* Species: unique identifier of species (4-letter code corresponding to the first two letters of the genus and first two letters of species)
* Period: the time period (year) of sampling, either \"DuringClosure_2019\" or \"DuringClosure_2020\"
* Longitude
* Latitude
* DateTimeUTC: date and time of the GPS fi..., , **Changes after Jun 16, 2025:** Changed filtering of spatial features in the scripts make_parking_raster.R, make_road_raster.R, and make_footprint_raster.R to align with the methods used in the manuscript.