An artificial waterway and road restrict movements and alter home ranges of endangered arboreal marsupial
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors studied the home ranges of an endangered arboreal marsupial, the western ringtail possum (Pseudocheirus occidentalis), with a focus on the impacts of a road and an artificial waterway on their movement.
read more
Abstract: Artificial linear structures can cause habitat fragmentation by restricting movements of animals and altering home ranges. The negative impacts of these linear structures, especially of those other than roads, on arboreal species have been rarely studied even though these species can be greatly affected because of their fidelity to the canopy. We studied the home ranges of an endangered arboreal marsupial, the western ringtail possum (Pseudocheirus occidentalis), with a focus on the impacts of a road and an artificial waterway on their movement. We radiotracked 18 females and 19 males along a major road and an artificial waterway near Busselton, Western Australia, for 3 years and estimated home ranges using an a-local convex hull (a-LoCoH) estimator. No possum crossed the road successfully during the monitoring period while one crossed the waterway. Males had a mean home range size of 0.31 ± 0.044 (SE) ha, almost double that of the females at 0.16 ± 0.017 ha. Possums near the waterway had larger home ranges (0.30 ± 0.048 ha) than those near the road (0.19 ± 0.027 ha), and the size increased with proximity to the waterway, probably due to the greater availability of nearby canopy connections and the lower availability of preferable foliage. These results demonstrate that both the road and waterway represent significant physical barriers to possums, and the artificial waterway influenced home ranges more severely than the road. This suggests that linear infrastructure other than roads can affect movements of strictly arboreal animals, and negative impacts of these structures need to be assessed and mitigated by reconnecting their habitat, just as those of roads.
read more
Chat with Paper
AI Agents for this Paper
Find similar papers on Google Scholar, PubMed and Arxiv
Write a critical review of this paper
Analyze citations of this paper to find unaddressed research gaps
Citations
Research, part of a Special Feature on Effects of Roads and Traffic on Wildlife Populations and Landscape Function Large Gaps in Canopy Reduce Road Crossing by a Gliding Mammal
Rodney van der Ree,Silvana Cesarini,Paul Sunnucks,Joslin L. Moore,Andrea C. Taylor +4 more
- 01 Jan 2010
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the road-crossing behavior of 47 squirrel gliders (Petaurus norfolcensis) using radio-tracking and showed that retaining and facilitating the growth of tall trees in the center median of two-way roads may mitigate the barrier effect of roads on gliders, thus contributing positively to mobility and potentially to connectivity.
64
Linear infrastructure drives habitat conversion and forest fragmentation associated with Marcellus shale gas development in a forested landscape.
TL;DR: The results suggest new pads should be placed near pre-existing pipelines and methods to consolidate pipelines with other infrastructure should be used to reduce future fragmentation, as core forest will continue to lose as a result of new pipelines and infrastructure particularly on private land.
52
Artificial canopy bridges improve connectivity in fragmented landscapes: The case of Javan slow lorises in an agroforest environment.
TL;DR: The use and monitoring of artificial canopy bridges are advocated as an important supplement for habitat connectivity in conservation interventions and a trend toward an increase in their home range size and reduced ground use is shown.
42
Mammal conservation in a changing world: can urban gardens play a role?
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explored the potential for residential gardens to assist the conservation of mammals using an online questionnaire administered to residents of two case study cities in Australia to identify how widespread mammals in cities can be, which garden features promote mammal presence, and if the features varied among species with different habitat requirements.
36
A remarkably quick habituation and high use of a rope bridge by an endangered marsupial, the western ringtail possum
Kaori Yokochi,Roberta Bencini +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors monitored the use of a rope bridge near Busselton, Western Australia by the endangered western ringtail possums (Pseudocheirus occidentalis) in order to identify the patterns of use and factors influencing the crossings.
References
•Journal Article
R: A language and environment for statistical computing.
TL;DR: Copyright (©) 1999–2012 R Foundation for Statistical Computing; permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and permission notice are preserved on all copies.
410.8K
•Book
Model Selection and Multimodel Inference: A Practical Information-Theoretic Approach
Kenneth P. Burnham,David E. Anderson +1 more
- 19 Jun 2013
TL;DR: The second edition of this book is unique in that it focuses on methods for making formal statistical inference from all the models in an a priori set (Multi-Model Inference).
45.1K
Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities
Norman Myers,Russell A. Mittermeier,Cristina G. Mittermeier,Gustavo A. B. da Fonseca,Jennifer Kent +4 more
TL;DR: A ‘silver bullet’ strategy on the part of conservation planners, focusing on ‘biodiversity hotspots’ where exceptional concentrations of endemic species are undergoing exceptional loss of habitat, is proposed.
30.9K
Kernel methods for estimating the utilization distribution in home-range studies
TL;DR: Kernel methods are of flexible form and can be used where simple parametric models are found to be inappropriate or difficult to specify and give alternative approaches to the Anderson (1982) Fourier transform methods.
4.3K
Guidelines of the american society of mammalogists for the use of wild mammals in research
Robert S. Sikes,William L. Gannon,Darrin S. Carroll,Brent J. Danielson,Michael R. Gannon,David W. Hale,Christy M. McCain,Link E. Olson,Sarah Ressing,Robert M. Timm,Janet E. Whaley +10 more
TL;DR: The American Society of Mammalogists (ASM) published guidelines for the use of wild mammal species in research as mentioned in this paper, which provide a broad and comprehensive understanding of the biology of nondomesticated mammals in their natural environments.