Research, part of a Special Feature on Effects of Roads and Traffic on Wildlife Populations and Landscape Function Quantifying the Road-Effect Zone: Threshold Effects of a Motorway on Anuran…

By Felix Eigenbrod, S. Hecnar, L. Fahrig. 2009

178 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The negative effect of roads on wildlife is recognized as a major contributor to the global biodiversity crisis, with anurans being among the most vulnerable groups overall. The "road-effect zone," i.e., the extent of significant ecological effects from the edge of a road (Forman and Alexander 1998), has important management implications, but has never been quantified for anurans. In the first study of its kind, we measured the extent and type of relationship underlying the road-effect zones of a motorway with a high proportion of heavy-truck traffic, particularly at night (Highway 401) for anuran species richness and relative abundance. We surveyed 34 ponds located 68-3262 m from the edge of the motorway, and used piecewise and linear regressions to determine if road-effect zones were clearly delineated by ecological thresholds. We found road-effect zones of 250-1000 m delineated by ecological thresholds for four of seven species and species richness, and road-effect zones of well beyond 1000 m best described by linear regressions for two species. The negative effect of Highway 401 was unexpectedly strong for four of seven species suggest that, in addition to road mortality, very high nighttime truck traffic can actually lead to reduced use of breeding habitat near the motorway either by acting as a barrier to forest habitat on the other side of the highway and/or because of traffic noise. Our results show that most anurans are likely to have reduced abundances near motorways, but that both the extent of the effect of this type of road and the underlying relationship vary considerably between species. Furthermore, the noise and/or barrier effect of very high nighttime traffic volumes can lead to negative effects of motorways even on species that are relatively unaffected by direct road mortality.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/38a4c8e6f99e9e52d0597e2f554f0d349b7644dc

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Citations in the corpus

Plasticity in the vocalizations of anurans in response to traffic noise (2010, background): “Anuran populations are known to be reduced near high-traffic roads (Eigenbrod et al., 2009), so at these sites the number of individuals and species of chorusing anurans should be lower.”
Amphibian distribution in a traditionally managed rural landscape of Eastern Europe: Probing the effect of landscape composition (2010, background): “…on amphibian pond occupancy at various spatial scales was tested in Europe (e.g., Pellet et al., 2004; Denoël and Ficetola, 2007; Zanini et al., 2008; Ficetola et al., 2009) and in North America (e.g., Lehtinen et al., 1999; Houlahan and Findlay, 2003; Price et al., 2006; Eigenbrod et al., 2009).”
Do fences create an edge-effect on the movement patterns of a highly mobile mega-herbivore? (2010, methodology): “We used ranges of initial estimates of the breakpoint at 500 m intervals based on visual inspection of the Lowess smoothing function (Eigenbrod et al., 2009; Toms and Lesperance, 2008).”
Research, part of a Special Feature on Effects of Roads and Traffic on Wildlife Populations and Landscape Function Frogs Call at a Higher Pitch in Traffic Noise (2009, background): “Decreases in the species richness and relative abundance of frogs have been observed hundreds of meters away from a highway in eastern Ontario, Canada (Eigenbrod et al. 2009).”