UC Berkeley

Wildlife is increasingly forced to share space with humans, facing disturbances that operate across different spatial and temporal scales. The press-pulse framework, originally developed in the disturbance ecology literature, distinguishes between long-term sustained 'presses' and more acute 'pulses'. Because pulses occur during ongoing press conditions, their ecological effects depend on how they interact with that background, helping explain why certain disturbances result in transient, localized changes, while others lead to lasting, widespread impacts. Here, we expand this framework by applying it to regimes of human disturbances, and incorporating 'pauses' as a third category. Pulses and pauses (e.g. episodes of extreme weather, or drastic changes in human mobility) can substantially affect wildlife behaviour, yet their effects are often modulated by background 'press' conditions. We offer a conceptual framework for disentangling effects across space and time and highlight how plasticity in wildlife movement-particularly in terms of navigating risks and tracking resources-can lead to both adaptive and nonadaptive responses to human disturbances. This enables predictions about how shifts in animal movement can influence human wildlife interactions and conflict with humans under different scenarios. Applying the press-pulse-pause framework to movement ecology allows researchers to improve our understanding of how wildlife is affected by different disturbance regimes, advancing efforts to foster sustainable human-wildlife coexistence in an era of mounting pressures.