>> Alright we have about a minute before we start. Just really quick, if you're not familiar with the format of these sessions, I'm not necessarily familiar with these sessions. [laughter]. Each speaker is gonna have four minutes to present. I'm gonna flash a yellow card to those speakers at three minutes in. And then with 30 seconds to go I'm gonna flash a white card. After the end of the session we have everybody checked in but one speaker so we may be skipping over the 14:12 time slot but at the end of the session we'll take about five minutes to get each speaker to an individual table and then you'll have plenty of time to interact with those speakers and ask your questions at that time. Alright? So we've got about 30 seconds. Do you want four minutes and 30 seconds? [laughter]
>> Um alright, cool. Well thanks for coming, you guys. I'm gonna slowly start talking while people walk in, I guess. We've been monitoring road kill at a whole variety of sites in eastern Turkey and in the southern part of the U.S. and in California. Today I'm just gonna talk to you about California data. Roads are bad, everybody say "boo."
>> [unison, half-heartedly] Boo.
>> Ah, apparently you love roads. I'd thought you'd be very anti-road. More roads are worse. I just moved to a new University in California a few years ago and it's a wonderful laboratory to do these types of studies. This shows the same pattern we see at regional scales. These are the major roads in southern California, Kriged at 100 meters and 500 meters, basically 1/3 of the county is agriculture, 1/3 is urban, 1/3 is wilderness so it's a nice place to do these kinds of studies. These are driving surveys. These are actually transects of roads. These aren't point data. These are actual real transect data. This database started being accumulated in 2006. It's opportunistic. We have no money for this. So about 1/4 of the data is collected by my undergrads and it's a whole variety of survey segments. We have a lot of surveys that total over about 49,000 kilometers driven today and about 4,000 things in the database. It comes out to roughly about one thing killed every 10 kilometers. Managers really find this data useful. This is only the large things. This is only the mountain lion and deer and things of that nature. The Santa Monica Mountains is an area of about 1,000 square kilometers so this is about five large things dying each year per square kilometer so it's very high kill rate and we can give them data for the county wide. If we add all the vertebrates on there it goes up a couple orders of magnitude. When you talk to managers about road kill, generally speaking the impression given is that in Protected Areas or relatively intact areas that's where they think the biggest problem is going to be because that's where they have the most intact, most diverse populations and communities and they tend not to be too worried about cars. Outside of those areas they think, well, not that much road kill. It's mostly a lot of cars and people. And it turns out we've been finding the actual interface is the key area. So this is some data broken down into core and edge for a series of mountains Ñ the coastal mountains Ñ a little more inland mountains, and then a forest area. And it might be a little hard to read this first guy here. This is geographically speaking, so if we look just based on where the road kill is happening, what we see at this large scale is that the edge is where stuff's happening. The core has about 40%, the kill, per length of road as to the edge. Same thing for this forest and it's about half that for the mountains. Now managers are right in terms of the density of kill, the efficiency of kills. So if you look at how efficient kills are within these four areas, four wetlands, what have you, cars are really good, proportionally speaking, at killing stuff and the kill rate is significantly higher. If you guys are interested in this we have a new iPhone app. I was hoping, I just checked my email before I started talking. I was hoping those would be ready today, probably another two weeks or so. It's a free downloadable thing. The first version, all you can do is input the data. The next version is iterative and the next version you guys will be able to query the database and so we're hoping this will be really useful to managers around the world. Right now it's only populated with North American taxa Ñ it actually has Turkey as well now, actually Ñ but that's all so far. So in summary before I get the hook: road kill is a major source of mortality for most of the populations we look at. It's probably the number one source of mortality in southern California. There's all kinds of correlates; road speed, vehicle load, all that kind of stuff. But even with that you can still see these large-scale biogeographic patterns and again more kills on the edge. Vehicles are more efficient inside these patches and lastly download our obnoxious iPhone app. Thanks you guys. ^M00:04:45 [ Applause ] ^M00:04:50 [ Silence ]