Abstract
Roads impact wildlife in multiple ways, most conspicuous amongst which are animal-vehicle collisions (AVCs). Mitigation measures to reduce AVCs at the local scale are often centred on species-specific crossing zones and collision hotspots. However, at the road network scale, consideration of interactions among road, species and traffic characteristics influencing AVC occurrence is required to design effective mitigation strategies. We modelled traversability—the probability of an animal successfully crossing a road- across an Indian highway for six large mammal species under different scenarios of road and traffic characteristics. Among the study species, group-living and slow-moving animals had higher AVC probabilities that increased significantly with increasing traffic volume and proportions of heavy vehicles in the traffic flow. The risk of AVC was higher for species that were active near roadside habitat during peak traffic hours. Our approach could help identify roads that pose potential mortality risks to animals using empirical data on animal and traffic characteristics. Results suggest that regulating traffic volume and heterogeneity on existing road stretches could potentially reduce animal mortality and barrier effect. Mitigation on roads expected to carry heavy traffic loads passing through ecologically-sensitive areas should be prioritised to ensure traversability for animal communities.
Highlights
The transportation infrastructure of a nation is vital for its social and economic growth, especially for a developing economy
Under present traffic heterogeneity and average hourly traffic volume (245 ± 20 vehicles/h) on NH44, lowest average daily animal-vehicle collisions (AVCs) probabilities were found for tiger (0.13 ± 0.05) and leopard (0.11 ± 0.04) (Fig. 1)
We found that an increase in group size increased the probability of hit while increasing animal velocity decreased the probability of hit (PIC − 0.005; 95% CI − 0.011 to − 0.002)
Summary
The transportation infrastructure of a nation is vital for its social and economic growth, especially for a developing economy. Variations in roadkill rates among species have been attributed to various environmental and species-specific features such as age group or life history s tage[16,17,18,19], sex and d iet[20,21], and animal activity p atterns[6,22] These traits are critical for identifying species most vulnerable to mortality and barrier effects for effective mitigation. Mitigation of roadkill and barrier effects of rapidly expanding road networks requires identification of road sections that may cause animal mortalities and barriers to animal movement, and species most likely to be involved in A VCs8. Mitigation for rapidly expanding road networks should be informed by road and traffic characteristics such as road types, and projections of traffic g rowth[33] and traffic composition or ‘heterogeneity’ that is the proportion of different vehicle types in a traffic flow[8]
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