A phantom road experiment reveals traffic noise is an invisible source of habitat degradation

作者：Ware, Heidi E.^*; McClure, Christopher J. W.; Carlisle, Jay D.; Barber, Jesse R.

来源：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015, 112(39): 12105-12109.

DOI：10.1073/pnas.1504710112

• traffic noise pollution
• songbird migration
• habitat degradation
• foraging-vigilance trade-off
• perceived predation risk

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.

• 出版日期2015-9-29