School of Earth, Environmental, & Marine Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-24-2025
Abstract
Roadside exclusionary fencing is commonly used on highways to prevent wildlife-vehicle collisions. Although it can mitigate wildlife road mortality by limiting their access to the road, it can also create a barrier for wildlife stranded within the right-of-way. On State Highway 100 in Texas, the Texas Department of Transportation installed 10 wildlife exits (WEs) to allow endangered ocelots and other wildlife to escape the fenced roadway and minimize wildlife-vehicle collisions. Our study compared three types of WE designs within the same area from 2019 to 2024 to assess their effectiveness. The first design (Design A) was without a door and berm, and the second design (Design B) had a raised berm (10 WE sites) with a door (six WE sites) and no door (four WE sites). Lastly, a third design (Design C) had all the structural features of Design B, except for the raised berm removed from all ten WE sites. We used the approaches of four meso-carnivore target species (coyote, bobcat, northern raccoon, and striped skunk) as a metric and binomial generalized linear model as a statistical method to evaluate the effectiveness between three designs. The statistical analysis showed that the raised berm in Design B was the major cause for a decline in the approaches of meso-carnivore communities toward the WE sites. With the berm removal in Design C, the approaches of target species from road to habitat increased significantly in the sites without a door. Our study indicates that the WE door design might be another structural cause for limiting its effectiveness, where significantly lower approaches were recorded for meso-carnivores in the sites with a door compared to those without a door in Design C.
Recommended Citation
Maharjan R, Langbein JE, Young JH, Ryer K, Fierro-Cabo A, Rahman MS, et al. (2025) Assessing the effects of design modifications on the use of wildlife exits designed for endangered Texas ocelots. PLoS One 20(6): e0323705. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0323705
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Publication Title
PLoS One
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0323705
Included in
Earth Sciences Commons, Environmental Sciences Commons, Urban Studies and Planning Commons
Comments
© 2025 Maharjan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.