Abstract
This paper is the first to report data on wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVC) in Wallonia, southern Belgium, characterised by one of the densest road network worldwide. With the collaboration of police we identified 3965 accidents involving “free ranging animal” between 2003 and 2011. We observed that these accidents with free ranging animals result in 13% of cases in injuries for the drivers or passengers, and in less than 1% of cases in fatalities (death). 78% of these casualties involve wild animals, among which wild boar take the largest part (39% ). During the covered period we observed an annual increase of WVC of 21%. For wild boar and red deer, this increase was significantly correlated with hunting statistics, used as an index of population density. The temporal analysis demonstrated an increase of WVC during night time with peak of accidents at dusk and dawn. Monthly distribution revealed the role of breeding, dispersal and hunting in shaping temporal patterns of accidents. Spatial analysis, focusing on wild boar, roe deer, red deer and red fox demonstrated clustering of accidents for all these species, until scale between 20 to 70 km. Mapping of accidents via Kernel density analysis permitted us to highlight areas with high risk of WVC risk. Our study suggests that the problem of car accidents due to wildlife is an increasing concern in Wallonia but results on spatial and temporal patterns should help for setting up mitigation measures in the most sensible areas. Moreover we suggest that police data source should be used for nationwide analysis and for comparison between countries.
Highlights
These last decades, simultaneous increase in infrastructure networks and ungulates populations (Burbaitė and Csányi 2010; Milner et al 2006; Saez-Royuela and Telleria 1986) has lead to an increase in the number of wildlife vehicle collisions (Groot Bruinderink and Hazebroek 1996; Romin and Bissonette 1996; Seiler 2004)
The method is likely to underestimate the total number of accidents, as police is not called in every casualties cases, we assumed that impact with large mammals have higher chance to end into important car damage requiring police intervention and report
Dogs take the largest part of accidents with close to 10%, while wild boar and roe deer are together responsible of 45% of accidents with wild animals. 13% of accidents resulted in human injuries or death and the rest resulted in car damages. 7% of casualties occur on highways, 50% on national roads and 43% on regional or local roads
Summary
These last decades, simultaneous increase in infrastructure networks and ungulates populations (Burbaitė and Csányi 2010; Milner et al 2006; Saez-Royuela and Telleria 1986) has lead to an increase in the number of wildlife vehicle collisions (Groot Bruinderink and Hazebroek 1996; Romin and Bissonette 1996; Seiler 2004). WVC involve any size of species, car damage, injuries or fatalities are mostly caused by collision with larger species (> 30kg) (Barthelmess and Brooks 2010; Ford and Fahrig 2007) These accidents have high impact through vehicle damage. WVC induce population reduction (Lodé 2000) and can impact differently animal populations (Bissonette and Adair 2008) It can affect weakly animal population when accounting for a small part only of the population mortality (Groot Bruinderink and Hazebroek 1996), moderately when reaching mortality level equal to hunting activities (Forman and Alexander 1998; Gosselink et al 2007) or greatly in some cases when population viability is threaten (Huijser and Bergers 2000; Kramer-Schadt et al 2004). Transport infrastructures induce habitat modifications and landscape fragmentation (Forman and Alexander 1998)
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