A phantom road experiment reveals traffic noise is an invisible source of habitat degradation
Decades of research demonstrate that roads impact wildlife and suggest traffic noise as a primary cause of population declines near roads. We created a “phantom road” using an array of speakers to apply traffic noise to a roadless landscape, directly testing the effect of noise alone on an entire songbird community during autumn migration. Thirty-one percent of the bird community avoided the phantom road. For individuals that stayed despite the noise, overall body condition decreased by a full SD and some species showed a change in ability to gain body condition when exposed to traffic noise during migratory stopover. We conducted complementary laboratory experiments that implicate foraging-vigilance behavior as one mechanism driving this pattern. Our results suggest that noise degrades habitat that is otherwise suitable, and that the presence of a species does not indicate the absence of an impact.
Publication Date: 2015
Credits: PNAS Early Edition www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1504710112
Fair Use OK
DOWNLOAD FILE — PDF document, 1,012 kB (1,036,773 bytes)
