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Amphibian road mortality in Europe: a meta-analysis with new data from Poland

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Abstract

While the increasing vehicular traffic is widely suspected to play a role in the worldwide amphibian population decline, the research of amphibian road mortality is scarce, fragmented, fraught with methodological problems, and largely inconclusive. As the first attempt at a synthesis, we analyzed all available data on amphibian mortality in Europe and combined them with four previously unpublished surveys conducted by us. Based on our recalculation of road-kill counts in terms of species-specific road-kill recordability, we conclude that, in lowland Central Europe, the common toads, Bufo bufo, are the most common victims of vehicular traffic in suburban landscapes, while the common frogs, Rana temporaria and Triturus newts, prevail in rural landscapes. The green frogs also tend to be more frequent in rural areas. Common tree frogs, Hyla arborea, are unexpectedly rare in the road-kill record despite their terrestrial and migratory habits. In consideration of problems with obtaining accurate amphibian population estimates, we further propose the road kills-to-spawners ratio (R/S) as a working measure of the impact of road mortality on a local population. While the R/S ratio may not reflect the losses to an entire local amphibian population, it is free of the errors of whole-population estimates, which are notoriously difficult for amphibians. When corrected for species-specific road-kill recordability, most results suggest that the impact of roads on newts may have been underestimated and that the impact on common frog populations may be higher than on those of common toads.

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Acknowledgments

We thank E. Buchwald (National Forest and Nature Agency, Copenhagen), A. Zywicka for a pilot study of the area in Wrocław suburbs, and an anonymous reviewer for his exquisite criticism and corrections.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Zoology, University of Wrocław, 21 Sienkiewicz Street, 50-335, Wrocław, Poland

    Andrzej Elzanowski, Joanna Ciesiołkiewicz, Mirella Kaczor, Joanna Radwańska & Radosław Urban

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  1. Andrzej Elzanowski
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  2. Joanna Ciesiołkiewicz
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  3. Mirella Kaczor
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  4. Joanna Radwańska
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  5. Radosław Urban
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Correspondence to Andrzej Elzanowski.

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Communicated by H. Kierdorf

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Table S1

Amphibian road-kill density (km−1 year−1) on the roads surveyed in this study and by others (see Table 1) with the most fragmentary and single-species record at the bottom. Actual figures (A) have been corrected (C) for using road-kill recordability conversion factors (see “Materials and methods”). Column abbreviations as in Table 1 footnote except UN unidentified, NS Salamandridae (DOC 55 KB)

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Elzanowski, A., Ciesiołkiewicz, J., Kaczor, M. et al. Amphibian road mortality in Europe: a meta-analysis with new data from Poland. Eur J Wildl Res 55, 33–43 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10344-008-0211-x

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