Predicting when animal populations are at risk from roads: an interactive model of road avoidance behavior

Our results suggest that, in general, the most vulnerable populations are those with high noise and high road surface avoidance, and secondly, those with high noise avoidance only. Conversely, the least vulnerable populations are those with high car avoidance only, and secondly, high road surface and high car avoidance. Populations with low overall road avoidance and those with high overall road avoidance tend to respond in opposite ways when the sensitivity to the four road effects is varied. The same is true of populations with high road surface avoidance when compared to those with high car and high noise avoidance. The model further predicted that traffic volume has a larger effect than road size on the impact of roads on population persistence. One potential application of our model (to run the model on the web or to download it go to www.glel.carleton.ca/ or www.nls.ethz.ch/roadmodel/index.htm or contact the first author) is to generate predictions for more structured field studies of road avoidance behavior and its influence on persistence of wildlife populations.