Abstract
Roads and their traffic can affect wildlife over large areas and, in regions with dense road networks, may influence a high proportion of the ecological landscape. We assess the abundance of 75 bird species in relation to roads across Great Britain. Of these, 77% vary significantly in abundance with increasing road exposure, just over half negatively so. The effect distances of these negative associations average 700 m from a road, covering over 70% of Great Britain and over 40% of the total area of terrestrial protected sites. Species with smaller national populations generally have lower relative abundance with increasing road exposure, whereas the opposite is true for more common species. Smaller-bodied and migratory species are also more negatively associated with road exposure. By creating environmental conditions that benefit generally common species at the expense of others, road networks may echo other anthropogenic disturbances in bringing about large-scale simplification of avian communities.
Highlights
Roads and their traffic can affect wildlife over large areas and, in regions with dense road networks, may influence a high proportion of the ecological landscape
We calculated the road exposure of almost 20,000 Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) transect sections using the locations of all paved roads within a 5-km radius of the midpoint of each transect section
We modelled the mean annual counts of 75 species in relation to road exposure, using Poisson generalised additive mixed models (GAMMs), whilst accounting for other potential predictors of bird abundance
Summary
Roads and their traffic can affect wildlife over large areas and, in regions with dense road networks, may influence a high proportion of the ecological landscape. Known human drivers of population change are numerous and include habitat loss[9], human–wildlife conflict[10], overharvesting[11] and climate change[12] In recent years, another environmental issue has become a subject of increasing attention—the extensive and expanding global road network. Roads are a source of noise, wildlife–vehicle collisions, chemical pollution and visual disturbance, including artificial light[18,19,20,21]. Their construction leads to fragmentation effects and changes in local habitat, and often exposes surrounding areas to further development and other human activities[22,23]. Species with reduced abundances around roads may have smaller national population sizes, either because roads have contributed directly to their declines or because their national scarcity is caused by their inability to tolerate disturbance, which may manifest itself in an avoidance of roads
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