Christian Rutz

It is predicted that the world’s urban population will surge from 4.4 billion to 7 billion people by 2050. This dramatic expansion will drive land conversion on a planetary scale, to produce food, extract resources, and establish infrastructure. As a result, the natural world has come under unsustainable pressure from human activity. To address this crisis, the 30×30 and Half-Earth initiatives propose to protect 30 to 50 percent of the planet’s surface. What will happen with the remaining 50 percent? Without immediate action, these unprotected areas will be committed to highly destructive transformation. Therefore, we must develop environmental planning strategies that promote sustainable human–wildlife coexistence.

Until now, innovation has been hindered by our limited understanding of how animal movements and behavior are affected by land modification and human disturbance. Our current method of choice for filling this knowledge gap is bio-logging, the use of cutting-edge miniature “wearables” that remotely record high-resolution tracking data. While our Covid-19 Bio-Logging Initiative is driving transformational advances in our understanding of human–wildlife interactions, it revealed a surprising lack of data from human-modified habitats.