Research In Progress Brief: Assessing Road Risks to Protected Wildlife to Guide Iowa DOT’s Mitigation Efforts, 2024

(2024) Research In Progress Brief: Assessing Road Risks to Protected Wildlife to Guide Iowa DOT’s Mitigation Efforts, 2024. Transportation, Department of

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Abstract

Abstract *Roads pose several risks to wildlife due to sources including direct mortality from vehicle collisions, fragmentation of key habitat, and barriers to movement that result in isolated populations. For imperiled species, such threats can have an outsize impact on species persistence. Mitigation efforts such as wildlife crossings, fencing, roadside vegetation management, and retrofitting roads with wildlife-friendly design features have been shown to be effective at reducing the negative impacts of roads on wildlife. A project is proposed, to identify priority sites in Iowa where road mitigation can provide the largest benefit to Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN). Ongoing work developing habitat suitability models will be built on for a suite of SGCN to predict statewide species’ relative occurrence statewide and calculate an index of expected biodiversity. Geospatial data on road configuration, traffic intensity, and wildlife mortalities will be used to quantify road risk to identify sites with the highest combined biodiversity scores and road risk. Field surveys will be conducted at these sites to ground-truth model predictions, provide empirical estimates of species richness and density, and evaluate the feasibility and expected benefits of different mitigation efforts. Project deliverables will include: (1) recommendations for road mitigations at 10 sites identified to be SGCN hotspots and (2) a web-based application for users to explore predicted hotspot maps and prioritize future sites for mitigation. This project will help the Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT) reduce negative impacts of roads, support conservation of Iowa’s wildlife, and provide a framework for prioritizing mitigation efforts that can serve as a model for other states in the Midwest.