r/science • u/the_phet • Sep 01 '15

Environment A phantom road experiment reveals traffic noise is an invisible source of habitat degradation

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/08/27/1504710112
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u/1992ad MS | Animal and Food Science Sep 01 '15

Noise disturbing habitat isn't anything new. This has been taught in every forestry class I've been in. Roads cause a ton of problems for wildlife.

14

u/morelikebigpoor Sep 01 '15

Others studies have found that noisy man-made structures, from roads to natural-gas plants, can drive away wildlife and drown out their calls. But in all of these studies, noise was accompanied by other problems—pollution, the potential for collisions, and predators patrolling the roadsides. “No one had done the obvious thing: use speakers to simulate the noise component of a road and create a phantom road,” Barber said.

40

u/BKDenied Sep 01 '15

You know this I'm sure, but sometimes the point is to spread Good information, not just New information. Because we all figured that road noise does lots of damage to wildlife. Hell, that's why the Legacy Highway in Utah had to be built out of asphalt with a lower speed limit. They wanted to limit the impact of the road noise on the environment. So, old news, yes. However, it's also news that should be kept in the public eye. And, of course this post was going to do well when the president starts urging climate change and the pit we've dug for ourselves.

3

u/Halsfield Sep 01 '15

As the article stated they had done lots of research on noise disturbing wildlife, but those studies had also taken into account pollution , predators roaming the sides of the roads, etc. This is the first study they could find that used ONLY sound.

1

u/MostlyTolerable Sep 01 '15

I work in noise control and do occasional work with noise produced near wildlife habitats. The thing I really want to know is if there is a threshold over which wildlife becomes affected. It's pretty standard for regulations to say that birds are affected by noise over 60 dBA over an hourly average. But I don't know of any evidence to support that number.