Abstract
Roads may act as barriers to flying insects: species composition of bees and wasps differs on two sides of a large highway
Highlights
The increasing amount of infrastructure and road networks in the landscape is a major cause of habitat fragmentation (e.g. Forman and Alexander 1998, Jackson and Fahrig 2011)
We investigated if the road verges on both sides of the E4 differed in vegetation characteristics, as these variables may have consequences for the interpretation of the results from the Correspondence Analysis (CCA)
By analyzing differences in species composition along two sides of a large road we found indications that roads may act as barriers on the movement of bees and wasps
Summary
The increasing amount of infrastructure and road networks in the landscape is a major cause of habitat fragmentation (e.g. Forman and Alexander 1998, Jackson and Fahrig 2011). Roads may act as barriers to animal movements, resulting in animals avoiding or not being able to cross roads, and leading to animals suffering a high mortality when moving between habitats intersected by roads (Forman and Alexander 1998, Trombulak and Frissel 2000). Some studies on the effects of roads on insects exist, indicating that large roads can cause disruption of movements between habitats in butterflies (Askling et al 2006) and bumblebees (Bhattacharya et al 2003). It is likely that barrier effects of roads are most pronounced in species with poor dispersal ability, and studies of butterflies indicate that it is mainly smaller species that avoid crossing roads (Askling et al 2006) and suffer from the highest road mortality (Skórka et al 2013). To our knowledge this has not been investigated before
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