Vasylyna Stakh
Other projects
24 Aug 2018
Mortality of Amphibians on the Roads of Transcarpathian Province (Western Ukraine)
Transport infrastructure, mainly automobile roads, is one of the significant disturbing factors in functioning of amphibian populations. Roads fragmenting the environment have negative impact upon the level of amphibian activity leading to the animal-road conflict. Amphibians being globally endangered are very sensitive to such type of influence as it complicates migrations, results in high mortality, decreases population stability etc. So, the main project goal is to give the biological estimation to the level of road and transportation impact on the condition of amphibian populations recommending mitigation measures including ecological education of the target groups of people.
Filling in data sheets in the Carpathians.
The project team is going to check the mortality of amphibians on the automobile roads of Lviv province, to ascertain their qualitative and quantitative composition and to compare with our preliminary results. Lviv province as a research territory is the only province of Ukraine various parts of which are represented by mountainous, hilly, lowland and wetland landscapes. One of the important results of the work will be visualization, i.e. making maps of amphibian mortality on the roads of the province. Such an approach will give us an opportunity to establish the modern status of the problem and it will be the good basement for starting different conservation actions focused on the decreasing of amphibian mortality rate on the roads and solving the animal-road conflict in total. We are planning also to give some lectures on the project topic for schoolchildren, students, local authorities etc., prepare and publish brochure with the general information about the essence of the conflict. It will have not only cognitive, but also didactic value. In parallel, we also are going to organize eco-educative actions involving schoolchildren, students, nature reserves staff and the representatives of local communities into them. Such a combination will facilitate the comprehension of the problem and let the target groups of people get more information about the role of amphibians in the ecosystem, their life-cycles, migrations, conservation efforts and mitigation measures.
Our preliminary work pointed out some road sections with high amphibian mortality, gave us a possibility to approve the field methods, and let us step up to the elaboration of estimation criteria of the road impact on the populations of amphibians. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out the complex research of amphibian mortality on the roads of Lviv province, compare the population conditions, establish the traffic intensity dynamics, choose model road sections to investigate seasonal peculiarities of amphibian migration dynamics, and propose some mitigation measures as well.