Abstract
Moose (Alces americanus ) vehicle collisions (MVCs) are an issue throughout the distribution of moose. Many mitigation strategies have been tested and implemented to reduce the number of MVCs, but there have been few empirical analyses of the effectiveness of roadside vegetation cutting. The goal of this study was to determine if roadside vegetation cutting attracted moose into roadside areas to browse on the vegetation regrowth. We hypothesized that moose would be attracted to roadside areas with cut vegetation. Consequently, we predicted that there would be higher levels of browsing in cut areas compared to uncut areas. To determine if moose were browsing more in cut or uncut areas, we measured the number of plants browsed by moose in paired treatment (cut on or after 2008) and control (not cut since at least 2008) sites, along with a suite of potential environmental covariates. Using a model selection approach, we fit generalized linear mixed-effects models to determine the most parsimonious set of environmental variables to explain variation in the proportion of moose browse among sites. In contrast to our hypothesis, our results show that the proportion of moose browse in the uncut control areas was significantly higher than in the cut treatment areas. The results of this study suggest that recently cut roadside areas (7 years or less based on our work) may create a less attractive foraging habitat for moose. The majority of the variance in the proportion of moose browse among sites was explained by treatment type and nested plot number within site identification (34.16%), with additional variance explained by traffic region (5.00%) and moose density (4.35%). Based on our study, we recommend that vegetation cutting be continued in roadside areas in Newfoundland as recently cut areas may be less attractive browsing sites for moose.
Highlights
Wildlife-vehicle collisions are a significant problem in many areas of the world, including the United States, Canada, and Europe [1,2,3]
The candidate set of models consisted of four models, with three of the models having ΔAICc values of
Even though our study only contained six paired treatment-control sites, the effect size of roadside vegetation cutting on moose browsing was very large
Summary
Wildlife-vehicle collisions are a significant problem in many areas of the world, including the United States, Canada, and Europe [1,2,3]. As more roads and infrastructure are constructed, we decrease the natural connectivity of ecosystems, leading to wildlife-vehicle encounters. Large ungulates are one of the most problematic species groups involved in wildlife-vehicle collisions. The population size of ungulates in many areas is quite high, with over 1.1 million moose [4] and 28.5 million white-tailed deer [5] occurring in North America alone. PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0133155 August 5, 2015
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