Roadways act as barriers to the movement of wildlife populations as they attempt to move from habitat to habitat, sometimes making them susceptible to things such as mortality, wildlife-vehicle collisions, fragmenting and/or destructing habitat, interrupting ecological processes, and increasing pollution and erosion. To find solutions to the issues roadways pose, one thing researchers in road ecology have found is debating whether to keep the number of road’s already existing and expand off of those, or to keep increasing the number of roads that already exist by implementing new ones. From your perspective, what would you do?
In the Real-World
Researchers studying road ecology and attempting to understand the impacts roads have on the adjacent environment or wildlife populations have used various methods to understand how mortality impacts wildlife populations through road systems, such as through increasing the number of roadways or traffic volume that already exists. Studies conducted on this found increasing traffic volume on existing roads have a lower impact on wildlife than creating new roads (Rhodes et al, 2014). When measuring levels of traffic volume, researchers assess impacts to wildlife; this can be done by accounting for risks towards wildlife populations along with various species that could be affected. Researchers investigating this were able to determine that traffic volume creates very substantial and negative consequences for wildlife, even as traffic increases (Charry & Jones, 2009).
What This Means for Wildlife & the Environment
When researchers in road ecology are developing plans to either extend an already existing road or implement a new road into the environment, there are a lot of considerations to be factored: how the road will be implemented to cause the least destruction possible, how the road once implemented will impact the surrounding environment (i.e., roads fragment the edges of an environment, causing an edge effect to occur), how the road will cause wildlife to potentially use it for crossing, etc. These factors are important, and from the studies described above attempting to understand this more, it is seen that extending already existing roads is much more beneficial to wildlife and the environment than creating new roads. Traffic volume is another consideration that goes into the plans of road ecology; the amount of traffic on a road can create very substantial and negative consequences for wildlife, such as increased wildlife mortality or wildlife-vehicle collisions on the road. However, when considering the pros and cons between the two options – either implementing a new road or extending an already existing one – the latter seems to have less consequences for the land and the wildlife surrounding the road. Road ecology should be broadened to consider how extending already existing roads rather than creating new roads would benefit wildlife and the environment as a whole, such as less instances of mortality and vehicle collisions while also increasing ecological processing in the environment overall. Road ecology could also broaden itself by implementing solutions into new road plans to create a new road that is wildlife and environmentally friendly, such as the ecopassages discussed in the previous post; this in turn would help the issues of traffic volume by giving wildlife an alternative to cross the road. Wildlife and the environment deserve to be tread upon lightly with care and compassion, as we have little left of what we started with. Roads are helpful for humanity to get us where we need to go, but in the end, is it worth sacrificing the land we have left for new roads, or leave the land for the wildlife to use and for the purposes of producing more of the natural environment and resources needed in the world today?
