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Hot Spots and Hot Times: Wildlife Road Mortality in a Regional Conservation Corridor

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Abstract

Strategies to reduce wildlife road mortality have become a significant component of many conservation efforts. However, their success depends on knowledge of the temporal and spatial patterns of mortality. We studied these patterns along the 1000 Islands Parkway in Ontario, Canada, a 37 km road that runs adjacent to the St. Lawrence River and bisects the Algonquin-to-Adirondacks international conservation corridor. Characteristics of all vertebrate road kill were recorded during 209 bicycle surveys conducted from 2008 to 2011. We estimate that over 16,700 vertebrates are killed on the road from April to October each year; most are amphibians, but high numbers of birds, mammals, and reptiles were also found, including six reptiles considered at-risk in Canada. Regression tree analysis was used to assess the importance of seasonality, weather, and traffic on road kill magnitude. All taxa except mammals exhibited distinct temporal peaks corresponding to phases in annual life cycles. Variations in weather and traffic were only important outside these peak times. Getis–Ord analysis was used to identify spatial clusters of mortality. Hot spots were found in all years for all taxa, but locations varied annually. A significant spatial association was found between multiyear hot spots and wetlands. The results underscore the notion that multi-species conservation efforts must account for differences in the seasonality of road mortality among species and that multiple years of data are necessary to identify locations where the greatest conservation good can be achieved. This information can be used to inform mitigation strategies with implications for conservation at regional scales.

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Acknowledgments

We are extremely grateful for logistic and in-kind support provided by Parks Canada through Thousand Islands National Park. We also thank Lenore Fahrig, Stephen Lougheed, and Emily Gonzales for their input and advice throughout the study, and Sinead Murphy, Tyler Kydd, and Marianne Kelly for their field assistance. We are highly appreciative of the reviews and suggestions provided by three anonymous reviewers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Environmental Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, K7L 3N6, Canada

    Evelyn Garrah & Ryan K. Danby

  2. Canadian Wildlife Service, Environment Canada, Gatineau, QC, K1A 0H3, Canada

    Ewen Eberhardt

  3. Geomatics and Landscape Ecology Research Laboratory and Department of Geography & Environmental Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6, Canada

    Ewen Eberhardt & Scott Mitchell

  4. Geomatics and Landscape Ecology Research Laboratory and Department of Biology, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6, Canada

    Glenn M. Cunnington

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  1. Evelyn Garrah
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  2. Ryan K. Danby
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Correspondence to Ryan K. Danby.

Appendix

Appendix

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Table 3 Comparison of road mortality rates on the 1000 Islands Parkway (this study) with results from other road mortality studies
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Garrah, E., Danby, R.K., Eberhardt, E. et al. Hot Spots and Hot Times: Wildlife Road Mortality in a Regional Conservation Corridor. Environmental Management 56, 874–889 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-015-0566-1

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