Evaluating the potential of road infrastructure greening and the relative importance of wildlife-vehicle collision data monitoring
Year: 2023
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The construction of linear transport infrastructure separates and fragments natural habitats, reducing carrying capacity and increasing mortality through wildlife-vehicle collisions. Wildlife mitigation structures like under and overpasses for roads, can help increase connectivity and reduce the number of animals crossing roads. However, these structures are typically difficult to design effectively, expensive to make, and time consuming to implement. An alternate solution to reduce the impact of roads on wildlife, could be to modify existing ‘grey’ infrastructure such as footbridges that are already in place. Grey infrastructure was identified throughout the UK using digital datasets and interpreted in GIS software. Once an extensive data set was complied, it was used to model connectivity changes of broadleaf and coniferous woodland networks on a 25km2 scale using Condatis, a circuit theory application. Modelling showed an average increase in connectivity of 8 to 12% across networks after infrastructure was modelled to have been modified for wildlife or ‘greened’. This theoretical modelling shows the potential of such methods but requires practical field data to confirm the simulated benefits. Additionally, wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVCs) were investigated for their value to species monitoring. Using WVC data from UK citizen science scheme ‘The Road Lab’, spatial distributions for 33 species were compared to National Biodiversity Network (NBN) data. Spatial overlap of species distributions between NBN and WVCs was above 95%. Despite the smaller sample size of WVC data, it still contained 541 species presence datapoints (5km2 grids) across the UK that were not represented by other NBN sources. WVC data also ranked highly for abundance of data points when compared to other NBN data providers. The high spatial overlap and relative abundance suggests WVCs are a suitable and complementary data source to standard species presence surveys, providing useful distribution insights that could be otherwise missed.
Author: Phillipps, Rhodri
Language: English
Subfield: Ecology
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Cardiff University
OpenAlex ID: W7065829174