Welcome to the technical sessions schedule for the 2015 SEAFWA Annual Meeting.
NEW THIS YEAR! The technical schedule is capable of being sorted by date (i.e, Monday, Nov. 2), track (i.e. Wildlife Technical Sessions), or session (i.e. Wildlife Session #1). You can also search for a presentation title (i.e. Changing Landscapes by Coalition), key term (i.e. striped bass), or presenter last name (i.e. Weaver). The sort and search functions can be found on the navigation panel on the right side of this page. If you hover over the "Schedule" button, you’ll also see different schedule view options (i.e. Grid or Simple). Try selecting each of them to see which view you prefer.
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Forrest E. Cortes, Todd D. Steury –Auburn University
Road mortality has been implicated as the most important transportation-related influence on wildlife populations. We examined the influence of distance to nearest vegetation, speed limit, and distance to urban center on carnivore road mortality frequency. We drove predetermined routes along 2-lane and 4-lane roadways and located carcasses within the shoulders of the road in East-Central Alabama. Carcasses were identified to species, and geographic coordinates of carcass locations were loaded into a GIS processing package for analysis. Properties of kill sites were compared statistically to those of randomly chosen sites along the same roadways. We found that for each 10-meter decrease in distance to vegetation, a site was 1.21 times as likely to be a road kill site (p = 0.044). Our results also indicated that for each 10 km decrease in distance to an urban area, a site was 2.14 times as likely to be a road kill site; however the results were not statistically significant (p = 0.091). Additionally, for each 1 km increase in distance to water, a site was 1.47 times as likely to be a road kill site; again the results were not statistically significant (p = 0.153). Finally, for each 10 mph increase in speed limit, a site was 1.40 times as likely to be a road kill site; the results were not statistically significant (p = 0.145). Our results suggest that transportation managers can most positively affect wildlife near roads by increasing the distance from road to vegetation.
