Wildlife roadkill patterns in a fragmented landscape of the Western Amazon

One of the most evident and direct effects of roads on wildlife is the death of animals by vehicle collision. Understanding the spatial patterns behind roadkill helps to plan mitigation measures to reduce the impacts of roads on animal populations. However, although roadkill patterns have been extensively studied in temperate zones, the potential impacts of roads on wildlife in the Neotropics have received less attention and are particularly poorly understood in the Western Amazon. Here, we present the results of a study on roadkill in the Amazon region of Ecuador; a region that is affected by a rapidly increasing development of road infrastructure. Over the course of 50 days, in the wet season between September and November 2017, we searched for road-killed vertebrates on 15.9 km of roads near the city of Tena, Napo province, for a total of 1590 surveyed kilometers. We recorded 593 dead specimens, predominantly reptiles (237 specimens, 40%) and amphibians (190, 32%), with birds (102, 1...