Thursday, October 23, 2008

Rural Herp Roadkill

This sounds like a great monitoring opportunity for a citizen science project.  If nothing else,  it tells an important story- herps have enough problems with global warming and fungus without the final nail of having a road between their breeding ponds and the rest of their range.
 
NEWS RELEASE
The Center for North American Herpetology
Lawrence, Kansas
http://www.cnah.org
20 October 2008

METHODOLOGIES FOR SURVEYING HERPETOFAUNA MORTALITY ON RURAL HIGHWAYS

2007 Journal of Wildlife Management 71(4): 1361–1368

Tom A. Langen, Angela Machniak, Erin K. Crowe, Charles Mangan, Daniel F.
Marker, Neal
Liddle & Brian Roden

Abstract: Road mortality can contribute to local and regional declines in
amphibian and
reptile populations. Thus, there is a need to accurately and efficiently
identify hotspots of
road-mortality for hazard assessment and mitigation. In 2002, we conducted
walking and
driving surveys throughout an extensive rural highway network in northern New
York,
USA, to evaluate survey methods and to quantify spatial and temporal patterns
of
herpetofauna road-mortality. In 2004, we repeated the surveys at a subset of
locations to
quantify interannual repeatability. Reptile and amphibian species had different
peak
periods of road-mortality because they differed in the causes of movements that
resulted
in crossings. Spatial locations of herpetofauna road-mortality were
concentrated at a
limited number of hotspots. Hotspots overlapped across species and were located
at
consistent locations across years. Results of walking and driving surveys were
highly
repeatable among survey teams, but driving surveys underestimated the density
of road-
mortality because many animals were missed. Detection failure was higher in
some taxa
(e.g., frogs) than others (e.g., turtles). Our results indicate that it is
possible to design a
valid, efficient methodology for locating hotspots of reptile and amphibian
road-mortality
along a road network and, thus, pinpoint priority sites for mitigation.

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A pdf of this article is available from the CNAH PDF Library at

http://www.cnah.org/cnah_pdf.asp

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