Sammendrag
Roads have a pervasive multi-faceted influence on ecosystems, including pronounced impacts on wildlife
movements. In recognition of the scale-transcending impacts of transportation infrastructure, ecologists
have been encouraged to extend the study of barrier impacts from individual roads and animals to
networks and populations. In this study, we adopt an analytical representation of road networks as
mosaics of landscape tiles, separated by roads. We then adapt spatial capture-recapture analysis to
estimate the propensity of wildlife to stay within the boundaries of the road network tiles (RNTs) that
hold their activity centres. We fit the model to national non-invasive genetic monitoring data for brown
bears (Ursus arctos) in Sweden and show that bears had up to 73% lower odds of using areas outside the
network tile of their home range centre, even after accounting for the effect of natural barriers (major
rivers) and the decrease in utilization with increasing distance from a bear’s activity centre. Our study
highlights the pronounced landscape-level barrier effect on wildlife mobility and, in doing so, introduces
a novel and flexible approach for quantifying contemporary fragmentation from the scale of RNTs and
individual animals to transportation networks and populations.
non-invasive genetic sampling, road network tile, island biogeography, road ecology, spatial
capture-recapture, fragmentation, carnivores, transportation network
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