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. ***** A pdf of this article is available from the CNAH PDF Library at http://www.cnah.org/cnah_pdf.asp |
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Rural Herp Roadkill
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