Managing road verges to promote flowers has been proposed as a conservation tool for pollinating insects in many parts of the world but there is a concern that these habitats might be attracting the insects to a highly deadly environment. We investigated whether traffic mortality of bumblebee queens was impacted by the flowering plant diversity in the road verge and the traffic volume and found that the probability of observing dead queens quadrupled when traffic increased from 100 to 6000 vehicles per day.

The opposite effects of roads (barriers) and road verges (corridors) have been not studied simultaneously and it is therefore unknown what the overall effect of road infrastructure is on the populations of pollinating insects. We used an experimental approach that allowed us to simulate pollen transfer between flowers placed in road verges with different flower densities to track the movement of flower-visiting insects in road environments.

Demand-controlled LED street lights are only fully illuminated when there is traffic and dimmed in the absence of traffic. In our study, dimming reduced the light on average by 35%. Effects of dimmed light on the abundances of nocturnal insects and bats were generally beneficial as fewer insects went into traps and fewer bat signals were recorded when the lights were dimmed.

We investigated the spatial changes in grasshopper and cricket assemblages in relation to a motorway passing through unmanaged grassland habitat in Croatia. For the first time, our results show that motorways affect grasshoppers and crickets at this level, with both detrimental and beneficial effects on their diversity, depending on the distance from the road.