ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF ROADS AND ANIMAL POPULATION VIABILITY

Road planning more and more requires the assessment of impacts on nature and the environment. Although impacts on individual animals have to be addressed, e.g. expected road kill rates, more emphasis should be put on the impacts of road construction and road use on the viability of populations. Models and expert systems may be helpful tools to assess population viability. These tools give the possibility to predict changes in viability, or even threats to the (local) survival of a species, before road construction is started and thus may play a key role in comparing scenarios and in decision making. Impacts of roads can be best analyzed with spatially explicit (meta) population models. However, these models require extended information about the biology and ecology of a species, which is often not available. Expert systems may be a practical alternative, facilitating rather easy, rule-based analyses of population viability for a variety of species. Different tools have been developed to study the potential effects of spatial developments, such as the construction of roads, on the viability of animal populations. For instance, with dynamic (meta) population models the impacts of spatial developments can be accurately quantified. However, these models are often species specific and require detailed field research to validate the parameters used. If a multi-species analyses is needed, the use of such models is often impractical and expensive. In that case, an expert system, in which analyses of different species can be aggregated, may be a better tool to assess these kinds of impacts. Pros and cons of both types of tools are illustrated across main roads in the Netherlands.

• Record URL:
  http://www.icoet.net/downloads/03Planning&Assessment.pdf
• 
• Supplemental Notes:
  • The complete proceedings are available at: http://www.itre.ncsu.edu/cte/icoet
• Corporate Authors:

  New York State Department of Transportation

  1220 Washington Avenue
  Albany, NY  United States  12232

  Federal Highway Administration

  1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Authors:
  • van der Grift, Edgar A
  • Verboom, J
  • Pouwels, R
• Conference:
  • 2003 International Conference on Ecology and Transportation (ICOET 2003)
  • Location: Lake Placid New York, United States
  • Date: 2009-8-24 to 2009-8-29
• Publication Date: 2003

Language

• English

Media Info

• Features: Figures; References;
• Pagination: 9p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Animal migrations; Decision making; Evaluation and assessment; Expert systems; Field studies; Population; Road construction; Road kill
• Geographic Terms: Netherlands
• Subject Areas: Design; Environment; Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Society; I21: Planning of Transport Infrastructure; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 00969067
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS, USDOT, STATEDOT
• Created Date: Feb 3 2004 12:00AM