As cities adopt mandates to protect, maintain and restore urban biodiversity, the need for urban ecology studies grows. Species-specific information on the effects of urbanization is often a limiting factor in designing and implementing effective biodiversity strategies. In suburban and exurban areas, amphibians play an important social-ecological role between people and their environment and contribute to ecosystem health. Amphibians are vulnerable to threats and imbalances in the aquatic and terrestrial environment due to a biphasic lifestyle, making them excellent indicators of local environmental health. We developed a citizen science program to systematically monitor amphibians in a large city in Alberta, Canada, where 90% of pre-settlement wetlands have been removed and human activities continue to degrade, alter, and/or fragment remaining amphibian habitats. We demonstrate successes and challenges of using publicly collected data in biodiversity monitoring. Through amphibian monitoring, we show how a citizen science program improved ecological knowledge, engaged the public in urban biodiversity monitoring and improved urban design and planning for biodiversity. We outline lessons learned to inform citizen science program design, including the importance of early engagement of decision makers, quality control assessment, assessing tensions in program design for data and public engagement goals, and incorporating conservation messaging into programming.

The intersection of wildlife and people on roads raises two critical issues: the barrier and mortality effects of roads on wildlife and risks to people from animal-vehicle collisions (AVCs). Road mitigation decisions are typically made at the discretion of transportation departments that are mandated to primarily address motorist safety. Therefore, prioritization of road sections for mitigation currently focuses on identification of spatial clusters of AVCs. We sought to understand if AVC clusters align with multispecies connectivity across roads to accurately identify multipurpose mitigation hotspots. We developed a decision-support tool based on weighted priorities for mitigation planning across 7,900 km of roads over an 84,000-km 2 area of southern Alberta, Canada. To assess alignment, we built functional connectivity models for four focal species (prairie rattlesnake, grizzly bear, mule deer, and pronghorn) and a species-neutral structural connectivity model. We integrated AVC risk and wildlife connectivity indices into Mitigation Priority Indices that varied the weighting of individual indices. Our results demonstrated poor spatial alignment between road sections of high motorist safety risk and those of high value for wildlife connectivity. Transportation planning would benefit from integrating motorist safety risk and wildlife management needs to prioritize mitigation neighborhoods along roadways.

Context. Road mitigation to reduce animal-vehicle collisions (AVCs) is usually based on analysis of road survey animal carcass data. This is used to identify road sections with high AVC clusters. Large mammals that are struck and die away from a road are not recorded nor considered in these analyses, reducing our understanding of the number of AVCs and the cost-benefit of road mitigation measures.Aims. Our aim was to develop a method to calculate a correction factor for large mammal carcass data reported through road survey. This will improve our understanding of the magnitude and cost of AVCs.Method. Citizen scientists reported animal carcasses on walking surveys along transects parallel to the highway and reported observations using a smartphone application at three sites over a 5-year period. These data were compared with traditional road survey data.Key result. We found that many large mammals involved in AVCs die away from the road and are, therefore, not reported in traditional road surveys. A correction factor of 2.8 for our region can be applied to road survey data to account for injury bias error in road survey carcass data.Conclusions. For large mammals, AVCs based on road survey carcass data are underestimates. To improve information about AVCs where little is known, we recommend conducting similar research to identify a correction factor to conventionally collected road survey carcass data.Implications. Identifying road mitigation sites by transportation agencies tends to focus on road sections with abovethreshold AVC numbers and where cost-benefit analyses deem mitigation necessary. A correction factor improves AVC estimate accuracy, improving the identification of sites appropriate for mitigation, and, ultimately, benefitting people and wildlife by reducing risks of AVCs.

Wildlife exclusion fencing has become a standard component of highway mitigation systems designed to reduce collisions with large mammals. Past work on the effectiveness of exclusion fencing has relied heavily on control–impact (i.e., space-for-time substitutions) and before–after study designs. These designs limit inference and may confound the effectiveness of mitigation with co-occurring process that also changes the rate of collisions. We used a replicated (n = 2 sites monitored for over 1000 km years combined) before-after-control-impact study design to assess fencing effectiveness along the Trans-Canada Highway in the Rocky Mountains of Canada. We found that collisions declined for common ungulates species (elk, mule deer, and white-tailed deer) by up to 96% but not for large carnivores. The weak response of carnivores is likely due to the combination of fence intrusions and low sample sizes. We calculated realized fencing effectiveness by applying the same change in collision rates observed at control (unfenced) sites as the expected change for adjacent fenced sections. Compared with the apparent fencing effectiveness (i.e., the difference in WVCs rates before and after fencing was installed), the realized estimates of fencing effectiveness declined by 6% at one site and increased by 10% at another site. When factoring in the cost of ungulate collisions to society, fencing provided a net economic gain within 1 year of construction. Over a 10-year period, fencing would provide a net economic gain of > $500,000 per km in reduced collisions. Our study highlights the benefits of long-term monitoring of road mitigation projects and provides evidence of fencing effectiveness for reducing wildlife–vehicle collisions involving large mammals.

Citizen science offers an excellent opportunity to engage the public in scientific data collection, educational opportunities, and applied management. However, the practicalities of developing and implementing citizen science programming are often more complex than considered. Some challenges to effective citizen science include scientists’ skepticism about the ability of public participants to rigorously collect quality data; a lack of clarity on or confidence in the utility of data; scientists’ hesitancy in engaging the public in projects; limited financial commitments; and challenges associated with the temporal and geographic scales of projects. To address these challenges, and provide a foundation upon which practitioners, scientists, and the public can credibly engage in citizen science, the Government of Alberta developed a set of citizen science principles. These principles offer a framework for planning, designing, implementing, and evaluating citizen science projects that extend beyond Alberta. Here, we present a case study using these principles to evaluate GrizzTracker, a citizen science program developed to help inform provincial species-at-risk recovery efforts. While we found that GrizzTracker applied each of the six principles in some way, including successful public engagement, strengthened relationships, and raising public awareness about northwest Alberta’s grizzly bears, we also identified a number of challenges. These included ongoing skepticism from the traditional scientific community about the utility of citizen science and governance challenges related to program leadership, staff capacity, and funding. By using the principles as a guideline, we provide policy recommendations for future citizen science efforts, including considerations for program design, implementation, and evaluation.

Cities worldwide are expanding in area and human population, posing multiple challenges to amphibian populations, including habitat loss from removal of wetlands and terrestrial upland habitat, habitat fragmentation due to roads and the built environment, and habitat degradation from pollutants, extensive human use and introduced species. We developed an eight‐step urban amphibian conservation framework based on established monitoring, analytical methods and community engagement to enable amphibian conservation in a large urban centre. The framework outlines a process used to conserve biodiversity in a complex landuse and decision‐making environment supported by a series of successive complementary modelling techniques to measure amphibian presence, priority habitat and functional connectivity. We applied the framework in Calgary, Alberta, Canada to illustrate its potential. Here, urbanization has reduced wetlands by 90% and ecological knowledge on amphibians was poor. We improved knowledge on amphibian diversity and distribution, identified core wetlands and movement pathways for amphibian species and identified barriers in the wetland network where construction or restoration measures could re‐establish amphibians or increase their densities. This knowledge was shared with ecologists and city planners for implementation through appropriate policies and plans. Our framework provides a series of stepwise products to improve an urban municipality's ability to restore or conserve priority habitat and movement pathways necessary for amphibian survival under pressure from multiple land uses. The framework provides a platform to identify city plans, policy and or programmes and to derive necessary information to support amphibian conservation.

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