Bad moon rising? The influence of the lunar cycle on amphibian roadkills

Mestre, Frederico; Lopes, Henrique Padovani Borges; Pinto, Tiago; Sousa, L. G.; Santos, Sara

doi:10.1007/s10344-019-1285-3

Cited by 13 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 83 publications

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“…This is a very low value considering that in Southern Portugal the mean abundance of road-killed amphibians is around 4.8 ind/km [72] but corresponds to similar levels of road-kills found in a previous study in northern Portugal (Matos et al [9]: approximately 0.45 ind/km for the surveys taking place between February and May 2011). Another study in Southern Portugal registered a very different value of road-killed amphibians per kilometer (Mestre et al [21]: 0.14 ind/km); however, this study took place over two years and covered almost all the seasonal variability (between September and May). The density of road-killed amphibians we obtained in our study in north Portugal is similar as well to the one described for the Salamanca region, Spain (0.23 ind/km), which also took place during spring [7].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…To mitigate road mortality, it is crucial to understand the factors influencing the occurrence and spatial location of road-kills, which are usually clustered in time and space, not occurring randomly [16]. Animal road-kills levels depend on many different factors, namely road characteristics, weather conditions, surrounding vegetation, proximity to water points, traffic, and species ecological traits [7,9,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. Species abundance is also highly important for the determination of road-kill patterns [23,24], yet this type of data is very difficult to obtain, namely in amphibians [7,9].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Spatial Approach for Modeling Amphibian Road-Kills: Comparison of Regression Techniques

Sousa‐Guedes

Franch

Sillero

2021

IJGI

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Road networks are the main source of mortality for many species. Amphibians, which are in global decline, are the most road-killed fauna group, due to their activity patterns and preferred habitats. Many different methodologies have been applied in modeling the relationship between environment and road-kills events, such as logistic regression. Here, we compared the performance of five regression techniques to relate amphibians’ road-kill frequency to environmental variables. For this, we surveyed three country roads in northern Portugal in search of road-killed amphibians. To explain the presence of road-kills, we selected a set of environmental variables important for the presence of amphibians and the occurrence of road-kills. We compared the performances of five modeling techniques: (i) generalized linear models, (ii) generalized additive models, (iii) random forest, (iv) boosted regression trees, and (v) geographically weighted regression. The boosted regression trees and geographically weighted regression techniques performed the best, with a percentage of deviance explained between 61.8% and 76.6% and between 55.3% and 66.7%, respectively. Moreover, the geographically weighted regression showed a great advantage over the other techniques, as it allows mapping local parameter coefficients as well as local model performance (pseudo-R2). The results suggest that geographically weighted regression is a useful tool for road-kill modeling, as well as to better visualize and map the spatial variability of the models.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Spatial Approach for Modeling Amphibian Road-Kills: Comparison of Regression Techniques

Sousa‐Guedes

Franch

Sillero

2021

IJGI

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“…Lunar factors are known to impact reproduction (Szmant-Froelich et al 1985, Perea et al 2022), migration (Somers and Stechey 1986, Sleeman et al 2010a, Norevik et al 2019), behavior (Naylor 2001, Mestre et al 2019), and physiology (Portugal et al 2019) across different species and ecosystems. For planktivorous elasmobranchs at Cocos, influence of lunar factors ranged from no influence to significant or large influence.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Determining the Role of Environmental Covariates on Planktivorous Elasmobranch Population Trends within an Isolated Marine Protected Area

Saltzman

White

2022

Preprint

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Several studies have found predictable relationships between the behavior of planktivores and environmental conditions, suggesting that planktivores may be especially sensitive to environmental change. However, many studies to date are based on limited observations, include few of the many environmental covariates which could influence planktivores, and do not occur over long enough time periods to make inferences about the potential effects of environmental change. As such, long term datasets on planktivores are necessary to disentangle the potential impacts of oceanographic and environmental variability. In this study, to elucidate the relationship between plankivores and environmental variability, we use data obtained over the last 28 years by a small group of divemasters at Cocos Island, Costa Rica, one of the oldest marine reserves in the world. We found that, in general, for planktivorous elasmobranchs, several environmental variables, such as, chlorophyll A, lunar cycle, and salinity have clear influences on their occurrence and relative abundances. We found that in the phases of lower illuminations, there were significant increases in abundance of mobula rays. Specifically, a 0.10 mg/m3 increase in Chlorophyll A correlated with 26% decrease in whale sharks. We found that increases in salinity correlated with increases in mobula abundance but did not correlate with observations of mantas or whale sharks. We also found that omission of environmental covariates can lead to overprediction and underprediction of relative abundances. Our findings highlight the need to take environmental conditions into account when evaluating the efficacy of marine protection.

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“…The majority of previous studies examining the relationships between amphibian roadkill patterns and environmental characteristics are often carried out at local scales [9,29,30], and knowledge of the differences between urban and rural contexts is also scant. In addition, conventional density-based methodologies looking at environmental drivers of wildlife roadkill [30][31][32] rely heavily on routine survey data, and thus are often restricted to the local scale.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating the Urban-Rural Differences in the Environmental Factors Affecting Amphibian Roadkill

Zhao

et al. 2023

Sustainability

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Roads have major impacts on wildlife, and the most direct negative effect is through deadly collisions with vehicles, i.e., roadkill. Amphibians are the most frequently road-killed animal group. Due to the significant differences between urban and rural environments, the potential urban-rural differences in factors driving amphibian roadkill risks should be incorporated into the planning of mitigation measures. Drawing on a citizen-collected roadkill dataset from Taiwan island, we present a MaxEnt based modelling analysis to examine potential urban-rural differences in landscape features and environmental factors associated with amphibian road mortality. By incorporating with the Global Human Settlement Layer Settlement Model—an ancillary human settlement dataset divided by built-up area and population density—amphibian roadkill data were divided into urban and rural data sets, and then used to create separate models for urban and rural areas. Model diagnostics suggested good performance (all AUCs > 0.8) of both urban and rural models. Multiple variable importance evaluations revealed significant differences between urban and rural areas. The importance of environmental variables was evaluated based on percent contribution, permutation importance and the Jackknife test. According to the overall results, road density was found to be important in explaining the amphibian roadkill in rural areas, whilst precipitation of warmest quarter was found to best explain the amphibian roadkill in the urban context. The method and outputs illustrated in this study can be useful tools to better understand amphibian road mortality in urban and rural environments and to inform mitigation assessment and conservation planning.

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Bad moon rising? The influence of the lunar cycle on amphibian roadkills

Cited by 13 publications

References 83 publications

A Spatial Approach for Modeling Amphibian Road-Kills: Comparison of Regression Techniques

A Spatial Approach for Modeling Amphibian Road-Kills: Comparison of Regression Techniques

Determining the Role of Environmental Covariates on Planktivorous Elasmobranch Population Trends within an Isolated Marine Protected Area

Evaluating the Urban-Rural Differences in the Environmental Factors Affecting Amphibian Roadkill

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