Many animals avoid roads due to traffic disturbance, but there are also some species that use roads in their everyday life and even obtain resources from them. Understanding the factors that influence the intensity of road use by these species can help understand temporal patterns of road mortality and thereby maximize the cost-effectiveness of mitigation measures. This study, conducted between 2009 and 2017 in Doñana, investigates the environmental factors influencing road use in the...

Barrier effect is a road-related impact affecting several animal populations. It can be caused by behavioural responses towards roads, associated emissions and/or circulating vehicles. Most studies so far have described road-effect zones along major roads, without determining the actual factor inducing the behavioural response. The purpose of the present study was to assess the factors potentially causing road-effect zones in a heterogeneous road network and eventually to estimate the...

Road-kill is the most recognized impact of traffic and an important threat for biodiversity. Nevertheless, most research on this topic deals with particular species or with road features, describing proximate correlates and rarely making inference on the mechanisms. Here it is provided a more general approximation by describing life-history, temporal and spatial factors affecting vertebrate road-kills in Mediterranean landscapes.

The use of wildlife road-crossing structures is less monitored for small mammals than for more emblematic species. Furthermore, because of the undeniable difficulty of small mammal track identification, most biologists usually carry out general surveys without species recognition. Here it is hypothesized that general surveys traditionally used for monitoring WCS by small mammals may be biased because the degraded habitats along roads are mainly used by generalist and not specialist species.