Current and probable past wildlife fatality hotspots on the Thousand Islands Parkway, Ontario, Canada

The impacts of roads on natural environments are varied and complex, but one of the most obvious impacts on wildlife populations is elevated mortality from collisions between vehicles and animals. Improved and efficient investment in mitigation requires knowledge of where (and why) roads have particularly high impacts on wildlife populations. We report on an animal road kill study on the Thousand Islands Parkway, near St. Lawrence Islands National Park, Canada. The objectives were to, for each taxon: (i) identify current vertebrate wildlife mortality hotspots; (ii) test for effects of traffic volume; and (iii) relate the road kill abundance to hypothesized landscape predictor variables related to wildlife habitat requirements. This was accomplished using a combination of intensive field data collection, visualization of kill densities, evaluation of the significance of spatial clustering of road kill using the network K-function, and a roving window regression analysis to model associations of kill zones with the surrounding landscape.