BRAZIL ROAD‐KILL: a data set of wildlife terrestrial vertebrate road‐kills

Abstract

Mortality from collision with vehicles is the most visible impact of road traffic on wildlife. Mortality due to roads (hereafter road-kill) can affect the dynamic of populations of many species and can, therefore, increase the risk of local decline or extinction. This is especially true in Brazil, where plans for road network upgrading and expansion overlaps biodiversity hotspot areas, which are of high importance for global conservation. Researchers, conservationists and road planners face the challenge to define a national strategy for road mitigation and wildlife conservation. The main goal of this dataset is a compilation of geo-referenced road-kill data from published and unpublished road surveys. This is the first Data Paper in the BRAZIL series (see ATLANTIC, NEOTROPICAL, and BRAZIL collections of Data Papers published in Ecology), which aims make public road-kill data for species in the Brazilian Regions. The dataset encompasses road-kill records from 45 personal communications and 26 studies published in peer-reviewed journals, theses and reports. The road-kill dataset comprises 21,512 records, 83% of which are identified to the species level (n = 450 species). The dataset includes records of 31 amphibian species, 90 reptile species, 229 bird species, and 99 mammal species. One species is classified as Endangered, eight as Vulnerable and twelve as Near Threatened. The species with the highest number of records are: Didelphis albiventris (n = 1,549), Volatinia jacarina (n = 1,238), Cerdocyon thous (n = 1,135), Helicops infrataeniatus (n = 802), and Rhinella icterica (n = 692). Most of the records came from southern Brazil. However, observations of the road-kill incidence for non-Least Concern species are more spread across the country. This dataset can be used to identify which taxa seems to be vulnerable to traffic, analyze temporal and spatial patterns of road-kill at local, regional and national scales and also used to understand the effects of road-kill on population persistence. It may also contribute to studies that aims to understand the influence of landscape and environmental influences on road-kills, improve our knowledge on road-related strategies on biodiversity conservation and be used as complementary information on large-scale and macroecological studies. No copyright or proprietary restrictions are associated with the use of this data set other than citation of this Data Paper.

Big cats are still walking in El Salvador: first photographic records of Puma concolor (Linnaeus, 1771) and an overview of historical records in the country

“…Tightly linked with the question of connectivity is the mortality from vehicle collision, often referred to as road-kills. In Latin America, the systematic investigation of road-kill has only recently been started (da Silva et al 2014;Grilo et al 2018), driven by concerns about the ecological impact of road network upgrading in Brazil. In El Salvador, no road-kill of a Puma has been registered so far, nor is there any systematic assessment of road-kill related to any mammal species.…”

Higher mortality rates for large‐ and medium‐sized mammals on plantation roads compared to highways in Peninsular Malaysia

“…We compared the effect of two paved road types ( Figure 1): (a) highways with two or four-lane roads and (b) plantation roads in palm oil production areas. We predicted that the WVCs would be greater in plantation roads due to their proximity to forest; as found in WVC studies in the United States, Brazil, and Italy (e.g., Eberhardt et al, 2013;Fabrizio et al, 2019;Grilo et al, 2018).…”

“…The vulnerability of wildlife to vehicle collisions is related to a range of factors such as mobility, habitat specificity, reproductive rate, resource need, and home range (Laurance et al, 2006). Furthermore, increased traffic volume, high speed roads and more highways, and wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVCs) have become more frequent, particularly in developing countries (Grilo et al, 2018). In Malaysia, increased deforestation and conversion of land to monoculture plantations as well as increased road expansion and development are likely to lead to increased WVCs as forests become more fragmented by plantation roads and highways (Azhar et al, 2013(Azhar et al, , 2014Clements et al, 2014;Kolowski & Nielsen, 2008;Wadey et al, 2018).…”

samc: an R package for connectivity modeling with spatial absorbing Markov chains

“…Mortality rates, R, can be approximated using several approaches, such as using field experiments (Fletcher et al 2019), habitat-specific survival estimates (Low et al 2010), or mortality risk data (e.g. roadkill data; Santos et al 2013, Grilo et al 2018. For instance, if annual survival rates are available, such rates could be scaled to reflect expected mortality rate per time step (where a 'time step' reflects the average time expected for movement between adjacent cells).…”