Ecological inheritance for a post COVID-19 world

Abstract

While the 2020 coronavirus pandemic disrupted the global economy and has been controlling the social behavior of the human population (Bavel et al. 2020), it is uncertain if it will mitigate the current biodiversity crisis and help nature to return to a ‘‘healthier’’ state. COVID-19 put billions of humans in isolation worldwide and reduced local and global traffic, indirectly affecting nature in many ways (Corlett et al. 2020; Bates et al. 2020). Given this ‘anthropause’ (Rutz et al. 2020), coronavirus became an ecologically powerful force that can also modify the extinction risks for various non-human species. In the Anthropocene, human activities are driving countless species to extinction (Ceballos et al. 2015). In our globalized world, amphibians in particular have been imperiled by anthropogenic trade, as the spread of Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis has endangered hundreds of frog species worldwide (Scheele et al. 2019). Curtailing the spread of a human virus by reducing trade, traffic and human movements, in our opinion, will also protect frogs from this pathogenic fungus (Fig. 1). In addition, it can minimize the chances of spillback of various infectious diseases (Liu 2020), some of them affecting wild and domestic animals worldwide (Roberton et al. 2006).