1 Departamento de Biologia, Universidade Federal de Lavras, Campus Universitário, PO Box 3037, Lavras, Minas Gerais, CEP 37200-000, Brazil. rafaelacobucicerqueira@gmail.com.
2 U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Science Applications, 101 12th Avenue, Fairbanks, AK, 99701, USA.
3 Centro UnB Cerrado, Universidade de Brasília, Campus Universitário Darcy Ribeiro, Asa Norte, Brasília, DF, CEP 70910-900, Brazil.
4 Departamento de Biologia, Universidade Federal de Lavras, Campus Universitário, PO Box 3037, Lavras, Minas Gerais, CEP 37200-000, Brazil.
5 Western Transportation Institute, Montana State University, PO Box 174250, Bozeman, MT, USA.
6 Department of Geography, Planning and Environment, Concordia University Montreal, 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W., Suite H1255, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8, Canada.
7 Department of Biology Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon & CESAM-Centre for Environmental and Marine Studies, University of Aveiro, 3810-193, Aveiro, Portugal.

Potential Movement Corridors and High Road-Kill Likelihood do not Spatially Coincide for Felids in Brazil: Implications for Road Mitigation.

Environ Manage. 2021 Jan 19; :

Authors: Cerqueira RC, Leonard PB, da Silva LG, Bager A, Clevenger AP, Jaeger JAG, Grilo C

Abstract

The negative effects of roads on wildlife populations are a growing concern. Movement corridors and road-kill data are typically used to prioritize road segments for mitigation measures. Some research suggests that locations where animals move across roads following corridors coincide with locations where they are often killed by vehicles. Other research indicates that corridors and road-kill rarely occur in the same locations. We compared movement corridor and road mortality models as means of prioritizing road segments for mitigation for five species of felids in Brazil: tiger cats (Leopardus tigrinus and Leopardus guttulus were analyzed together), ocelot (Leopardus pardalis), jaguarundi (Herpailurus yagouaroundi), and puma (Puma concolor). We used occurrence data for each species and applied circuit theory to identify potential movement corridors crossed by roads. We used road-kill records for each species and applied maximum entropy to determine where mortality was most likely to occur on roads. Our findings suggest that movement corridors and high road mortality are not spatially associated. We suggest that differences in the behavioral state of the individuals in the species occurrence and road-kill data may explain these results. We recommend that the road segments for which the results from the two methods agree (~5300?km for all studied species combined at 95th percentile) should be high-priority candidates for mitigation together with road segments identified by at least one method in areas where felids occur in low population densities or are threatened by isolation effects.

PMID: 33469694 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]