COVID-19 could accelerate the decline in recreational hunting: A natural experiment from Northern Italy.

Publisher: Public Library of Science Country of Publication: United States NLM ID: 101285081 Publication Model: eCollection Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1932-6203 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 19326203 NLM ISO Abbreviation: PLoS One Subsets: MEDLINE

Original Publication: San Francisco, CA : Public Library of Science

COVID-19*/epidemiology ; Recreation*; Italy/epidemiology ; Humans ; Animals ; SARS-CoV-2/isolation & purification ; Pandemics ; Incidence ; Animals, Wild/virology ; Conservation of Natural Resources

Although many studies highlighted the potential of COVID-19 to reshape existing models of wildlife management, empirical research on this topic has been scarce, particularly in Europe. We investigated the potential of COVID-19 pandemic to accelerate the ongoing decline in an aging population of recreational hunters in Italy. Namely, we modelled spatiotemporal trends between 2011 and 2021 in the number of recreational hunters in 50 Italian provinces with a varying incidence of COVID-19, and temporally delayed waves of infection. Compared to projections from 2011-2019 data, we detected a lower number of hunters who enrolled for the hunting season, both in 2020 (14 provinces) and in 2021 (15 provinces). The provinces with the highest incidence of COVID-19 in the Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna regions were also those experiencing the most marked decrease in hunting participation. Our findings revealed that a wildlife management system based on recreational hunting can be rapidly destabilized by epidemics and their associated public health measures, particularly when the average age of hunters is high, like in Italy. Considered the high incidence attained by COVID-19 in many European countries, where hunters are pivotal for the management of large ungulates and where they were already declining before the pandemic, our findings call for further large-scale research about the impact of COVID-19 on hunting participation.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2024 Cerri et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

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Date Created: 20240816 Date Completed: 20240816 Latest Revision: 20240818

20240818

PMC11329146

10.1371/journal.pone.0309017

39150926