Life Sciences Commons^™

A Phantom Road Experiment Reveals Traffic Noise Is An Invisible Source Of Habitat Degradation, Heidi E. Ware, Christopher J.W. Mcclure, Jay D. Carlisle, Jesse R. Barber

Biology Faculty Publications and Presentations

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 …