Abstract
Roads impact bat populations through habitat loss and collisions. High quality habitats particularly increase bat mortalities on roads, yet many questions remain concerning how local landscape features may influence bat behaviour and lead to high collision risks (e.g. influence of distance to trees, or of vegetation density). When comparing the potential danger of different road sections, the most popular method today is the use of simple bat detectors to assess the local densities of current populations at road sites. Yet, it is not known to which extent bat behaviour influences collisions (i.e. bats flying at vehicle height or on the side or above, co-occurrence of bats and vehicles). Behaviour is very rarely taken into account in practice, and this might lead to hazardous site selections for mitigation. Our goals were thus (i) to estimate how local landscape characteristics affect each of the conditional events leading to collisions (i.e. bat presence, flight in the zone at collision risk and bat-vehicle co-occurrence), and (ii) to determine which of the conditional events most contributed to collisions risks.
Highlights
Highways and main or secondary roads cover large surfaces of industrialised countries worldwide while road construction and traffic density rise continuously (Ibisch et al, 2016; van der Ree et al, 2015a)
Because of technical problems on two study sites, flight path tracking could not be carried out and these sites were used for modelling bat density only
Increasing distances to tree foliage were associated with a decrease in bat density for five species (M. daubentonii, P. pipistrellus, P. pygmaeus, M. schreibersii and N. leisleri) and for the mid-range echolocator” (MRE) guild, while it was associated with an increase for Plecotus species (Figure 5)
Summary
Highways and main or secondary roads cover large surfaces of industrialised countries worldwide while road construction and traffic density rise continuously (Ibisch et al, 2016; van der Ree et al, 2015a). Both networks lead to troubling impacts on wildlife, namely death by collision, loss of habitat amount and quality, population fragmentation, which in turn lead to negative impacts on population survival in numerous taxa (Rytwinski and Fahrig, 2015). To explain the direct ecological impact of roads, i.e. mortality by collision, several studies have investigated the role of road and land features on roadkill occurrence. Large animals that may be avoided by drivers represent only a very small percentage of the species impacted by collisions (D’Amico et al, 2015; Rytwinski and Fahrig, 2015) and the effects of local landscapes are likely to be species dependent, but knowledge is very scarce at the species level
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