The need to consider searcher efficiency and carcass persistence in railway wildlife fatality studies
- PDF / 429,971 Bytes
- 6 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 92 Downloads / 155 Views
SHORT COMMUNICATION
The need to consider searcher efficiency and carcass persistence in railway wildlife fatality studies Bibiana Terra Dasoler 1,2 & Andreas Kindel 1,2 & Júlia Beduschi 1,3 & Larissa D. Biasotto 1,2 & Rubem A. P. Dornas 1,4 & Larissa Oliveira Gonçalves 1 & Pryscilla Moura Lombardi 5 & Talita Menger 1,2,3 Gabriela Schuck de Oliveira 1,2 & Fernanda Z. Teixeira 1,2
&
Received: 31 October 2019 / Revised: 1 August 2020 / Accepted: 24 August 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract To improve mitigation planning on railways, it is crucial to accurately assess the number of fatalities resulting from this type of infrastructure. To illustrate the relevance of considering the two main errors from the sampling process (searcher efficiency and carcass persistence), we corrected the estimation of mammal fatalities (> 1 kg) on a 750-km railway located in the Brazilian Savanna accounting for these errors. Observed fatalities were collected by two observers in a rail inspection vehicle (RV). We estimated searcher efficiency comparing the number of carcasses found during the searcher efficiency trials on foot and by RV on the same subsections of the railway. Carcass persistence was estimated based on trials with a subset of carcasses that had their persistence verified over three consecutive days. Searcher efficiency was 29.8% and daily carcass persistence probability was 99.7%. Nine surveys on the entire railway (2015–2016) recorded 1950 carcasses and, after correcting for the sampling errors, we estimated that 4286 mammals died on this railway in 23 months. This estimate is 2.2 times larger than the observed number of fatalities. These errors should not be neglected, as our results demonstrate that the number of observed carcasses is a misperception in relation to the true number of fatalities caused by the railway. However, our results also indicate that dealing with these errors in railway ecology is still a challenge. We stress the need to test more suitable sampling designs for fatality estimates on railways. Keywords Linear infrastructure . Railway fatalities . Sampling errors . Wildlife-train collisions . Detectability . Carcass removal
Introduction This article is part of the Topical Collection on Road Ecology Guest Editor: Marcello D’Amico Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10344-020-01417-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Bibiana Terra Dasoler [email protected] 1
NERF, Núcleo de Ecologia de Rodovias e Ferrovias, Departamento de Ecologia, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil
2
Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ecologia, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil
3
Precisa Consultoria Ambiental, Porto Alegre, Brazil
4
Modelo Ambiental Consultoria e Projetos, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
5
Curitiba, Brazil
Linear infrastructure, such as roads and railways, can increase mortality rates of many species (Forman and
Data Loading...
