Abstract
Roads are one of the main causes of loss of biodiversity, with roadkill one of the main causes of mortality. The aim of this research was to identify sites with a high probability of roadkill of medium and large mammals, and the environmental variables that would explain it. We used the favourability function (F) to build the predictive models. There were 57 explanatory variables, and we collected 685 records of 10 species of medium and large native wild mammals from the ECOBIO Uruguay databases. They were grouped into native forest and grassland species, according to the main habitat. Two models were developed, one with all the variables and one with the anthropogenic variables. For both groups, the model obtained with all the variables was the most significant according to the evaluation indices used. This made it possible to identify the hot spots of roadkill (F > 0.6) for each of the groups. The anthropic variables were the ones that best explained these hot spots. This allowed the identification of sites where the probability of roadkill is high and requires a monitoring plan to implement mitigation measures in the future.
Highlights
Road systems generate changes in the landscape and in the territory, causing direct and indirect effects on the structure and composition of ecosystems
A total of 685 roadkill records were obtained for the most affected medium and large mammal species, based on the number of roadkill records and those that present some degree of threat at a national and international level, as in the case of the margay or the mulita (Table 1)
The favourability function was used to model and predict the spatiotemporal patterns of the roadkill effect for six species of medium and large mammals in native forests and four in natural grasslands, and to identify hotspots for roadkill. This represents a key contribution to the subject of road ecology in Uruguay, since it allowed us to identify the places with the highest probability of wildlife roadkill and to determine which environmental variables influence roadkill
Summary
Road systems generate changes in the landscape and in the territory, causing direct and indirect effects on the structure and composition of ecosystems. Some of these effects include, but are not limited to, animal roadkill, barrier effect, edge effect, dispersion of exotic species, changes in microclimates, contamination of water resources, and fragmentation of ecosystems [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Research related to the impacts of roads on biodiversity began in developed countries in the Northern Hemisphere (e.g., [9,10,11,12,13]). A study conducted by the NGO Vida Silvestre in 1999, in which the presence of roadkill on a main road in Uruguay was surveyed [19,20], provided a precedent in this area
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