Laurance, William F. (2015) Wildlife struggle in an increasingly noisy world. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112 (39). pp. 11995-11996.

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Abstract

[Extract] We live on an ever more-populous planet, pulsating with human-generated noises of every description. The most ubiquitous noise-making structures we produce are traffic-laden roads (Fig. 1), which already criss-cross much of the Earth and are projected to increase in length by some 25 million km by midcentury: enough to encircle the planet more than 600 times. For wildlife, the challenges of living in a world increasingly swamped by such infrastructures are only going to worsen.

Road ecology as a discipline has been galvanized by the realization that we are presently experiencing the most explosive era of infrastructure expansion in human history. A growing body of research is revealing the myriad ways that roads can affect wildlife and ecosystems, sometimes opening a Pandora's box of environmental problems, such as illegal hunting, encroachment, wildfires, and land speculation. Even where such activities are controlled, roads can still cause marked local changes in the abundance and behavior of wildlife, via edge effects, road kill, and vehicle noise and pollution.

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