The effects of roadways on lakes and ponds: a systematic review and assessment of knowledge gaps

Abstract

As the global population increases, the expansion of road networks has led to the destruction and disturbance of terrestrial and aquatic habitats. Road-related stressors have significant effects on both lotic and lentic habitats. While there are several systematic reviews that evaluate the effects of roads on lotic environments, there are none that consider their effects on lentic habitats only. We conducted a literature review to achieve two objectives: 1) to summarize the effects of roads on the physical, chemical, and biological properties of lentic environments; and 2) to identify biases and gaps in our current knowledge of the effects of roads on lentic habitats so that we could find promising areas for future research.
 Our review found 172 papers published between 1970-2020. The most frequently studied stressors associated with roads included road salt and heavy metal contamination (67 and 43 papers respectively), habitat fragmentation, (37 papers) and landscape change (14 papers). These stressors can lead to alterations in conductivity and chloride levels, changes in lake stratification patterns, increases in heavy metal concentrations in water and organisms, and significant mortality as amphibians disperse across roadways. We also identified a variety of other stressors that may be understudied based on their frequency of appearance in our search results, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, road dust, increased accessibility, hydrological changes, noise pollution, dust suppressants, sedimentation, invasive species introductions, and water withdrawal. 
 Our review indicated that there are strong geographic biases in published studies, with 57.0% examining North American sites and 30.2% examining European sites. Furthermore, there were taxonomic biases in the published literature, with most studies focusing on amphibians (41.7%), fish (15.6%), and macroinvertebrates (14.6%), while few considered zooplankton (8.3%), diatoms (7.3%), amoebas (5.2%), water birds (3.1%), reptiles (2.1%) and macrophytes (1.0%). Based on our review, we have identified promising areas for future research for each of the major stressors related to roadways. However, we speculate that rectifying the geographic and taxonomic bias of our current knowledge could significantly advance our understanding of the impacts of roads on lentic environments, thereby better informing environmental management of these important habitats.

Urban oasis? Abundant dice snake (Natrix tessellata) populations along artificial lakeside habitats in urban landscapes

“…We also predicted that; (iii) populations residing in larger settlements might experience heightened human disturbance due to a larger number of inhabitants and tourists resulting in decreased snake abundance. Additional to the negative effect of urban land cover and human disturbance, we also predicted that; (iv) road density; and (v) the proximity of roads would both negatively influence snake abundance due to road pollutants (Dixon et al 2022;Yang et al 2014) and higher risk of road mortality (Hallisey et al 2022). Moreover, it has been shown previously that the area of road cover and the proximity of roads positively correlate with the fluctuating asymmetry of dice snakes assuming higher developmental instability (Mészáros et al 2023).…”

“…This result implies that dice snake populations in areas with a more intense road network and closer to the main roads are more abundant. Earlier research has demonstrated that roads can exert significant biological, physical, and chemical effects on both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems (Dixon et al 2022), including the introduction of pollutants (Wang et al 2020), habitat fragmentation (Hamer et al 2021), road mortality (Farias et al 2022), and alterations to thermal regimes (Wang et al 2021). The thermal conditions within human settlements undergo substantial changes compared to rural areas due to the substitution of vegetative cover with impermeable, heat-absorbing artificial surfaces like buildings, concrete pavements, parking lots and asphalt roads (Wang et al 2021).…”

Assessment of Stormwater Quality in the Context of Traffic Congestion: A Case Study in Egypt

“…Road surface solids are diverse in composition. In addition to traffic-related activities, air deposition [25] and nearby soil [26] also contribute solids to the environment around urban roads. During transport, complicated mixing mechanisms are used for solids that are deposited on road surfaces.…”

Functional diversity of snakes is explained by the landscape composition at multiple areas of influence

“…Road development is one of the main drivers of land use and cover change, leading to habitat fragmentation, degradation, and loss of native species (Dixon et al, 2022 ; Moore et al, 2023 ). This anthropogenic drive also increases fauna collision probability, which varies depending on the value of the functional traits related to the species' vulnerability to roadkill (González‐Suárez et al, 2018 ; Rytwinski & Fahrig, 2012 ).…”