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 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.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its related human activity shutdowns provide unique opportunities for biodiversity monitoring through what has been termed the "anthropause" or the "great human confinement experiment." The pandemic caused immense disruption to human activity in the northeastern United States in the spring of 2020, with notable reductions in traffic levels.

The wood turtle (Glyptemys insculpta) is experiencing widespread declines throughout its range in the eastern United States and Canada. Maine has been considered a stronghold for the species due to an abundance of suitable upland and stream habitat. Furthermore, recent studies have identified Maine as a potentially important climate refuge for wood turtles. Using data collected in a 5-yr capture-mark-recapture study on a wood turtle population in central Maine, we estimate population size, apparent survival rates, population growth rates, and population viability. We also performed a sensitivity analysis to illustrate the impacts of slight perturbations to demographic rates. Our estimated total population size is 73 (95% CI = 69-85) individuals. Annual apparent survival varied across years, ranging from 80.5% to 97.5%, with females having a slightly higher survival at 94.9% (95% CI = 81.6%-97.8%) than males at 92.8% (95% CI = 77.6%-97.4%). The baseline population viability analysis model predicted a k of 0.93 (95% CI = 0.91-0.95) and a 100% probability of extinction within 150 yrs. Despite some broad permutations in our baseline demographic parameters, there were no scenarios included within our sensitivity analysis that increased the population's growth rate to a positive value. These results have implications for the long-term persistence of wood turtles in Maine and throughout their range. Our study helps fill a need for current data from this area that may be used to inform both local and regional management plans. KEY WORDS. -capture-mark-recapture, Program MARK, population viability analysis, VORTEX