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The global lockdown to mitigate COVID-19 pandemic health risks has altered human interactions with nature. Here, we report immediate impacts of changes in human activities on wildlife and environmental threats during the early lockdown months of 2020, based on 877 qualitative reports and 332 quantitative assessments from 89 different studies. Hundreds of reports of unusual species observations from around the world suggest that animals quickly responded to the reductions in human presence. However, negative effects of lockdown on conservation also emerged, as confinement resulted in some park officials being unable to perform conservation, restoration and enforcement tasks, resulting in local increases in illegal activities such as hunting. Overall, there is a complex mixture of positive and negative effects of the pandemic lockdown on nature, all of which have the potential to lead to cascading responses which in turn impact wildlife and nature conservation. While the net effect of the lockdown will need to be assessed over years as data becomes available and persistent effects emerge, immediate responses were detected across the world. Thus, initial qualitative and quantitative data arising from this serendipitous global quasi-experimental perturbation highlights the dual role that humans play in threatening and protecting species and ecosystems. Pathways to favorably tilt this delicate balance include reducing impacts and increasing conservation effectiveness.

Response of Tribal nations and Tribal communities to current and emerging climate change challenges requires active participation of stakeholders who have effective access to relevant data, information and analytical tools. The Tribal Lands Collaboratory (TLC), inspired by ESIP's Earth Science Collaboratory and currently under conceptual development, is a joint effort between the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC), the Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri), and the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). The vision of the TLC is to create an integrative platform that enables coordination between multiple stakeholders (e.g. Tribal resource managers, Tribal College faculty and students, farmers, ranchers, and other local community members) to collaborate on locally relevant climate change issues. The TLC is intended to facilitate the transformation of data into actionable information that can inform local climate response planning. The TLC will provide the technical mechanisms to access, collect and analyze data from both internal and external sources while also providing the social scaffolds to enable collaboration across Tribal communities and with members of the national climate change research community. The prototype project focuses on phenology, a branch of science focused on relationships between climate and the seasonal timing of biological phenomena. Monitoring changes in the timing and duration of phenological stages in plant and animal co­­­­mmunities on Tribal lands can provide insight to the direct impacts of climate change on culturally and economically significant Tribal resources. The project will leverage existing phenological observation protocols created by the USA-National Phenology Network and NEON to direct data collection efforts and will be tailored to the specific needs and concerns of the community. Phenology observations will be captured and managed within the Collaboratory environment where these data may then be correlated with regional climate data to investigate interactions between large-scale environmental changes and local impacts. Esri’s Story Maps is a candidate mechanism for sharing of those findings among Tribal stakeholders.