To better understand how people and wildlife interact, University of Wyoming Associate Professor Joe Holbrook is leading several ongoing projects. His work explores patterns that can help land managers, national parks, and conservation teams make informed decisions that support both outdoor recreation and long-term wildlife health, and accessing Cuebiq’s location data through Snowflake helps fuel his research.
Having migrated our privacy-preserving data platform to Snowflake’s powerful Snowsight workspace, Cuebiq is empowering researchers to access, explore, and analyze mobility data in a secure, scalable, and collaborative environment.
Researching Human and Wildlife Activity with Location Data
Dr. Holbrook’s research at University of Wyoming focuses on how human presence shapes wildlife behavior, movement, and outcomes.
One of the questions his team is exploring is the “human-shield hypothesis”. This concept suggests that some animals may use areas with higher human activity as safe zones to avoid more dominant predators.
In Grand Teton National Park, for example, his team is studying whether rising visitation levels are creating conditions helping smaller animals like the Rocky Mountain red fox steer clear of coyotes or gray wolves. If the larger predators avoid areas of heavier human activity, foxes may spend more time in those spaces. This research may help explain why red fox numbers have grown so significantly in the park over the past 30 years.
Human-wildlife interactions sit at the center of many modern conservation challenges. As Dr. Holbrook notes, outdoor recreation produces over $600 billion each year. With more people spending time in natural spaces, understanding when and how these interactions occur is more important than ever.
How is This Research Conducted?
Dr. Holbrook’s team combines GPS collar data from wildlife with Cuebiq’s aggregated human mobility data. Part of this involves transforming anonymized mobility signals into heat maps to note where and when people are most active in a given area.
With this data in hand, they test specific behavioral questions, such as:
- Do animals move faster in higher-activity zones?
- Do they avoid heavily visited areas beyond what would be expected?
- Do animals exposed to frequent human activity experience differences in reproduction or energy reserves?
These comparisons help reveal how animals adjust to changing environments and what it could mean for conservation planning.
Cuebiq’s platform and tools (including streamlined access through Snowflake) allow Dr. Holbrook’s team to process aggregated human mobility data quickly and integrate it directly into their analytical workflows. This reduces time spent preparing data and accelerates the path to measurable insights about human-wildlife interactions, and findings for their research.
Dr. Holbrook’s team is currently analyzing data from several projects, with findings to be shared as they move through preparation and peer review. As results become available, we look forward to sharing them.
Dr. Holbrook’s work reinforces how important it is to understand the impact of human activity on wildlife. Cuebiq is proud to support meaningful scientific discovery such as this with privacy-first data.
“Data For Good” is a Core Principle at Cuebiq
Continued access to high-quality location data is crucial to sustaining cutting-edge research. To remain at the fore of the “Data for Good” movement within the mobility data industry, Cuebiq adheres to three core principles of responsible data sharing:
Provenance: Cuebiq solely collects data from users who actively opt-in to anonymized data sharing for research purposes.
Privacy: In addition to anonymizing our data, Cuebiq applies patented privacy-enhancing technologies and abides by sensitive points of interest policy to protect the privacy of users who entrust Cuebiq with their data. Moreover, researchers access Cuebiq data through Cuebiq’s Snowflake-enabled Data Platform, which enables them to query granular data while solely receiving privacy-preserving aggregate outputs in return.
Accessibility: In addition to offering discounted access to our Data Cleanroom for research purposes, we provide a select number of pro-bono accounts annually to organizations that create profound social impact, and develop innovative open-source solutions for the geospatial community.
To learn more, feel free to contact us at Cuebiq.
