Effects of landscape on roadkill of medium and large-sized mammals in Southern Goiás, Brazil

Abstract

The highways have been identified as one of the main anthropogenic causes that influences the mortality of wildlife. Here, we investigated the effects of landscape structure on the roadkill mammal species in a section of 50-km of the highway GO-164, southern Goiás, Brazil. We divided the section of 10 quadrants of 25 km2 (sampling units), in which we measured abundance, richness, and species composition of roadkill mammals in response to two predictors of the landscape: distance to the river and percentage of habitat amount. We found that the richness of roadkill mammals is higher closer to the river and that roadkill mammalian species composition is affected by the habitat amount in the landscape. We conclude that there is a spatial variation driven by the landscape characteristics, which influences the occurrence of mammal roadkill.