Mammals with large home ranges, low reproductive rates, and small body sizes are most vulnerable to roads: A meta-analysis

In a previous meta-analysis, mammals with large home ranges, low reproductive rates, and large body sizes were found to respond most negatively to roads. However, due to correlations among these traits, it is not known whether these responses were due to a subset or all three traits. We conducted a multiple meta-regression of the effects of species traits on mammal responses to roads, using data from 92 studies, to determine whether an analysis with a larger sample size and controlling for correlations among traits will support the previous findings. The results reinforce the findings that mammals with larger home ranges and lower reproductive rates respond more negatively to roads. Surprisingly, we found that when controlling for the effects of home range size and reproductive rate, larger mammals respond less negatively to roads than smaller mammals. We speculate that the positive effect of body size is due to driver avoidance of collisions with larger mammals and/or differences in ro..., , # Mammals with large home ranges, low reproductive rates, and small body sizes are most vulnerable to roads: A meta-analysis

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.1g1jwsv9v](10.5061/dryad.1g1jwsv9v)

## Description of the data and file structure

We conducted a meta-analysis of the effects of species traits on mammal population responses to roads. We first updated the literature search by Rytwinski and Fahrig (2012) with recent literature that quantified a relationship between roads and mammal population abundance. Following screening at title/abstract and at full-text, we extracted the information needed to calculate an effect size from all included studies. We adjusted sample sizes to allow for a comparable weighting of effect sizes across the studies included in the meta-analysis. We reduced multiple non-independent effect sizes from the same study. We then collected information on species traits (home range size, reproductive rate, body mass) for all species for which a road effect could b...,