Estimating traffic volume and road age in Wyoming to guide resource management planning: Application to wildlife-vehicle collisions

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Average estimated traffic volumes (annual average daily volume; aadt) for all vehicles (A) and truck-only (B) traffic for all roads on the Wyoming road network from 1986 to 2020. Warmer colors indicate higher estimated traffic volumes. Errors are expressed as the average prediction interval for Wyoming from 1986 to 2020, scaled by the respective means for all vehicles (C) and truck-only (D) traffic. Image adapted from Inman et al. (2024).

To conduct the study, researchers generated annual estimates of road age and vehicle traffic for highways, arterial roads, feeder roads, local roads, and gravel/graded roads within Wyoming. These data can help managers ask broad questions about habitat fragmentation or identify which roads may provide opportunities to implement temporary road closures or traffic restrictions, including truck restrictions, to increase connectivity between populations. More broadly, these indicators of road age and traffic volume help address questions of “when” and “how much” roads impact the people, wildlife, and landscapes we care about. These new data also have the potential to inform resource management planning, as understanding the impacts of roads and traffic volume is needed.

After collecting this new data, the researchers used it to predict the incidence of reported wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVC) on select Wyoming roads. The evidence they found supports the threshold hypothesis for WVC, which states that an increase in traffic volume is equivalent to an increase in WVC until a threshold is reached, at which point an increase in traffic volume causes a decrease in WVC. These new methods will enable more informed road ecology studies to address how roads impact wildlife populations and critical ecosystems in Wyoming.

Publication: Inman, RD, Robb BS, O’Donnell MS, Edmunds DR, Holloran MJ, Aldridge CL 2024. Estimating traffic volume and road age in Wyoming to guide resource management planning: Application to wildlife-vehicle collisions. Ecological Indicators. 166(112410), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2024.112410

Related data release: Inman, RD, Robb, BS, O’Donnell, MS, Edmunds, DR, Holloran, MJ, and Aldridge, CL, 2024, Estimating Road Age and Traffic Volume in Wyoming Using Machine Learning and Graph Theory: U.S. Geological Survey Data Release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P137JNBY

A) Observed relationship between the number of reported vehicle-wildlife collisions (WVCs) and the annual average daily traffic volume (aadt) for all vehicles in Wyoming, USA. Taking all other factors into account, the highest number of reported WVCs is expected to be on roads with a traffic volume between 10,000 and 13,000 aadt for all vehicles. B) Traffic volume threshold assumption, where the number of people able to successfully cross the road (dashed line) decreases with increasing traffic volume, but road avoidance behavior (dashed line) also decreases. This results in a peak in observed WVC (solid line) at moderate levels of traffic volume. Figure 7 from Inman et al. (2024).

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