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Evaluates how landscape and seasonal changes affect bird diversity, suggesting structural impacts on roadkill patterns.
Road establishment in landscapes with varying structural complexity, such as mosaics of forests, agricultural areas, pastures, savannas, and riparian vegetation, can alter faunal dynamics by influencing how species use local resources. In the Brazilian semiarid region within the Caatinga domain, landscapes are characterized by strong seasonality and limited resource availability. Functional diversity has proven useful for understanding roadkill patterns, indicating that road mortality is a non-random process associated with species’ functional traits. This study evaluated whether landscape composition and seasonality influence the taxonomic and functional diversity of birds based on roadkill data from highways in the Brazilian semiarid region. It was expected that the rainy season and higher proportions of agriculture, forest formations, and savannas would be associated with higher diversity of roadkilled birds, whereas the dry season and higher proportions of bare soil and urban areas would be associated with lower diversity. The models revealed significant effects of both landscape composition and seasonality. Taxonomic diversity (Shannon–Wiener and Simpson indices) was negatively associated with agriculture, urban areas, water bodies, and the dry season, indicating lower diversity of roadkilled species under these conditions. Similarly, functional diversity (FRic, FEve, FDiv) showed negative associations with these variables. In contrast, the dry season positively affected functional richness (FRic). These findings highlight landscape structure as an ecological filter shaping species composition and roadkill patterns.
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Guimarães et al. (2026) studied this question.
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