Dr Tim Doherty, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Sydney, said it was already well known that humans affected the movement of animals, with thousands of studies tending to focus on single species or activities, but the information was disparate and hadn’t been synthesised.
Doherty personally read the summaries of 12,000 research articles extracted from academic journals around the world, before joining colleagues to pull out 208 relevant studies with enough useful data on how human activity had altered the distances that 167 different species moved.
When human activities forced animals to move further, such as when animals fled hunters or had to negotiate roads or avoid skiers or campers, they moved an average of 70% further in response.