How many rodents die on the road? Biological and methodological implications from a small mammals’ roadkill assessment on a Spanish motorway.

Some small mammal species use road verges as a habitat for sheltering. As a result, their populations suffer mortality from roadkill in an unknown extent. We analysed the road mortality of small mammals and the population impact of roadkill on wood mouse along 1 year on a 4-km motorway stretch. To account for potential bias in carcass sampling, we conducted walking surveys with the traffic interrupted and we performed three carcass persistence experiments to estimate total number of roadkills. The estimations were contrasted with previous studies and the population abundance on the road verges. The spatial pattern and the effects of seasonality and traffic volume on roadkill were analysed. We recorded 84 rodent carcasses with a mean carcass persistence of 6.65 days (SE = 0.41). The estimations of roadkill ranged between 190.2 and 238.3 individuals km−1 year−1, with a mean value close to a monthly 6 % mortality for the most common specie. Roadkill was more frequent during the hottest and driest months, and showed a unimodal relation with traffic peaking at 8100 vehicles day−1. A spatial aggregation of roadkill was detected with 80–190 m clustering. Our results suggest that, although rodents suffer greater roadkill mortality than previously reported, it affects a small percentage of the wood mouse population in our study area. This source of mortality is unlikely to affect population viability in the short term. Our results show that roadkill surveys should be specifically designed for small mammals to have a more accurate analysis of the effects of roadkill on their populations

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Ruiz-Capillas P. Mata C. y Malo J.E. How many rodents die on the road? Biological and methodological implications from a small mammals’ roadkill assessment on a Spanish motorway. Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11284-014-1235-1

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Retrieved: 30 Dec 2025 21:17:32
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Resource type Text
Date of creation 2025-05-23
Date of last revision 2025-05-23
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Metadata identifier 4d07d570-ef7c-5ffa-9781-2db5db82cf01
Metadata language Spanish
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ISO 19115 topic category biota
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Name of the dataset creator Ruiz-Capillas, P., Mata, C. y Malo, J.E.
Name of the dataset editor Wiley-Blackwell
Other identifier DOI: 10.1007/s11284-014-1235-1
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