本集内容

Wildlife in lockdown 野生动物在新冠肺炎疫情封锁期间的生活

学习要点

有关 “research（研究）” 的词汇

边看边答

What has been used to track animals during lockdown?

文字稿

There's plenty of video evidence on social media that wildlife might benefit from lockdown. And while it's been for tragic, costly reasons, we've pushed the pause button on human activity all over the world.

社交媒体上有大量的视频证据表明，野生动物可能会从新冠肺炎疫情的封锁中受益。由于这场悲剧的、代价惨重的疫情，我们按下了全世界人类活动的暂停键。

On an increasingly crowded planet, wildlife scientists think that this will have some profound effects. The only way to measure that, though, is with lots of bio-loggers.

在这个日益拥挤的星球上，野生动物学家们认为人类活动的暂停将产生一些深远的影响。然而，唯一能测量这一影响的方法是使用大量的生物记录器。

Professor Christian Rutz, University of St Andrews
A bio-logger is a small electronic device that can record, store and in some cases automatically relay information, so that information could be positional information - we can find out through satellite tracking where an animal goes and what it's up to.

克里斯蒂安·鲁兹教授     圣安德鲁斯大学
“生物记录器是一种小型电子设备，它可以录制、储存，并在某些情况下自动转发信息，这样一来，信息就可以带有位置信息，我们可以通过卫星追踪发现动物的行踪和活动。”

This animation shows just how much information those tiny trackers can gather. It shows more than 1500 birds’ movements and migrations logged over a decade.

这个动画显示了这些小追踪器可收集多少信息。动画中显示了超过1500只鸟类在过去十年来的移动和迁徙记录。

Studying human absence is more tricky, though. One famous study in the Chernobyl exclusion zone that I visited with scientists last year, has revealed how nature took over a landscape that was abandoned after the nuclear disaster.

然而，研究人类的缺席却更难。去年，我和科学家们访问了切尔诺贝利隔离区，在那里进行的一项著名的研究揭示了大自然接管核灾难后被人遗弃的土地的方式。

Now, though, in dozens of ongoing studies, wildlife researchers have their trackers on species from African elephants to migrating cuckoos, and some of that data has been automatically uploaded throughout lockdown.

但现在，在数十项正在进行的研究中，野生动物研究人员为非洲象、迁徙的布谷鸟等物种安装了追踪器，其中有一些数据已在疫情封锁期间被自动上传。

Professor Christian Rutz, University of St Andrews
And so this really is that an unprecedented opportunity to investigate this relationship between humans and wildlife and we hope that the insights this project will generate will help us to then inform future planning and there are some very specific recommendations that could come out of this.

克里斯蒂安·鲁兹教授     圣安德鲁斯大学
“所以，这确实是一次前所未有的机会，来研究人类和野生动物之间的这种关系，我们也希望这个项目所产生的深刻见解将帮助我们影响未来的规划，并从中得出一些非常具体的建议。”

This pause has been at huge human and economic cost, which is why scientists say it's important to maximise what we can learn from lockdown, about how to share the space we have with many other species.

这次人类活动的暂停已造成了巨大的人力和经济损失，这就是为什么科学家们说，重要的是最大限度地利用我们从疫情封锁中学到的东西，来与其它物种分享我们共有的空间。

词汇

profound 深远的

migrations 迁徙，迁移

unprecedented 前所未有的，史无前例的

insights 深刻的见解

inform 对……产生影响

问题答案

Small electronic devices called bio-loggers have been used.