Abstract
As Malaysia’s economy continues to grow, an ever-expanding road network is being built to support the new developments. Whilst roads increase accessibility to resources and connect human communities, they also bring with them a host of environmental problems such as destruction and fragmentation of habitat, poaching, pollution, and roadkills. Of these, roadkills are the most direct and visible impact of building roads, yet few dedicated studies have been conducted on the extent of roadkills and how to minimize them in Malaysia. In this study, we examined the species richness and abundance of vertebrate roadkills along eight one-km stretches (two in each habitat) of highways in Terengganu and Pahang across four habitat types: rainforest, oil palm plantation, subsistence agricultural land, and village. Each stretch of highway was surveyed by walking it six times between May to October 2017 for the Terengganu segments and May to October 2018 for the Pahang segments. A total of 305 roadkilled animals were recorded, consisting of at least 24 species. Three of these are protected by Malaysian law. The most common roadkilled animals were frogs (102 individuals) followed by birds (70 individuals), mammals (67 individuals) and reptiles (66 individuals). The highest number of roadkills were recorded in roads going through villages (112 individuals), followed by oil palm plantations (81 individuals), forests (65 individuals) and subsistence agricultural land (47 individuals). For every roadkill we also recorded the location’s specific habitat and landscape characteristics such as distance to the nearest fruit tree, tree, shrub, water body, human structure, and overhead cable. Most roadkills were found close to vegetation cover and water bodies. However, we found that roadkills decreased to near zero between 30 and 80 m from the nearest shrub or tree. Roadkills decreased over larger distances from the nearest water body, but in oil palm and village habitats, reducing water bodies within 20–50 m from a road would almost half the number of roadkills. We suggest that making changes to the structure and composition of roadside vegetation and other landscape features, such as thinning vegetation to discourage wildlife from gathering near roads, could significantly reduce the number of roadkills.
Highlights
Road traffic kills hundreds of millions of animals throughout the world every year (Spellerberg, 1998; Beckmann and Hilty, 2010), posing a significant threat to many species
The road segments on T151 ran through subsistence agricultural land and oil palm plantations
Of the carcasses that could be identified to species level, the species which exhibited the greatest mortality by far was the rice field frog Fejervarya limnocharis with 64 carcasses, more than half of which were found in the oil palm habitat, followed by the Malaysian wood rat Rattus tiomanicus with 22 carcasses, almost half of which were found in the oil palm habitat (Table 1)
Summary
Road traffic kills hundreds of millions of animals throughout the world every year (Spellerberg, 1998; Beckmann and Hilty, 2010), posing a significant threat to many species. The impact of road related mortality is not as notable in populations with high abundances, it may have a considerable effect on threatened or endangered species, which are often characterized by their low abundances (Forman and Alexander, 1998; Glista et al, 2008). Roads and their traffic could, be compared to a new predator for which the animals have not developed any defense mechanisms or behavioral adaptations that might increase their survival. Some populations may become unstable due to the additional mortality of adult and juvenile individuals (Andrews et al, 2008)
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