Nearly 9 million medium- and large-sized mammals (>1kg) could be killed on Brazilian roads each year, representing an estimated wildlife biomass of over 10,000 tons. Mortality from roads is a major threat to wildlife conservation in Brazil, and further research and mitigation is urgently needed to avoid species extinction.

Mammal roadkill can negatively affect wildlife populations but exactly how it does so remains unclear. This study reviewed globally published studies to examine how roadkill affects populations.

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.

A dramatic global rise in wildlife mortality due to vehicle collision has boosted a wide interest across disciplines to mitigate this impact through the installation of structures such as overpasses, underpasses, fences, etc. These structures can restore connectivity and improve population viability, even though research has found that some structures need to increase their effectiveness. So, it is more important than ever for optimal planning initiatives to be more precise, resilient, and adaptable enough to work for a wide range of species and taxa.

We used a long-term citizen science data set of bat roadkill and found the rates of mortality were higher in protected areas than non-protected area at higher elevation in Taiwan. In contrast, roadkill of common bat species was best explained by high levels of light pollution at lower elevations, suggesting that bats might be exposed to higher collision risk when they were attracted by insects around streetlights.

Short stretches of fences can substantially reduce roadkill along a fenced road section, especially if fence-end treatments are in place. However, with short fences there may still not be a net benefit because roadkill can be moved to nearby unmitigated road sections, especially just beyond a fence-end

Conservation landscapes are often frequently visited by tourists wanting to interact with wildlife, which can also increase threatening processes such as wildlife-vehicle collisions. Understanding how roadkill rates change with increasing tourism, and wildlife abundances concurrently, could help to identify successful mitigation measures which could be implemented pre-emptively.

There are more than 1,400 species of bats worldwide and they play critically important roles in ecosystem health. We conducted an international systematic review and found that many species of bats are significantly impacted by barrier effects due to the presence of roads, by mortality due to collision with vehicles, and by habitat loss and decreased activity due to habitat alteration.

Hedgehogs are among the most common victims of roadkill across Europe and most European hedgehog species are in decline. We undertook a comprehensive literature review to identify the impacts of road mortality on the viability of European hedgehog populations, potential mitigation solutions, and remaining knowledge gaps.

We studied the trade-off between wildlife mortality on roads and the barrier effect of fences. We found that fences are more likely to be beneficial for wildlife populations the higher the inclination of the species to attempt to move across the road and the higher the probability of the species being killed on the road.

This study aimed to clarify the level of agreement between potential movement corridors and areas of high predicted road mortality in order to identify optimal locations for mitigation. We recommend considering both approaches in parallel.

In order to reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions, is it better to use a few long, or many short, fences (FLOMS)? We devised an adaptive plan for prioritizing road sections for fencing, based on roadkill hotspots and coldspots, considering multiple scales and the FLOMS trade-off.

This study in Mexico showed that small wildlife experienced high rates of mortality and just like large charismatic species, they also require and deserve actions to avoid extinction.

Around ~194 million birds and ~29 million mammals could be killed each year on European roads, and some species are particularly vulnerable to additional mortality even with low rates of roadkill.

This research is a review of the road ecology publications and research that have been done in Africa to date to identify the areas and species that have been researched and the lessons learned from these as well as to identify recommendations for further areas of research.