Potential Wildlife-Highway Interactions at Select Mile-Markers Along Montana Department of Transportation Routes: An ArcView GIS Analysis

摘要

A potentially useful tool for MDT biologists and planners is a database table indicating where highways throughout the state show the potential for conflict with various vertebrate species. Given a list of potential species at a specified location, MDT biologists can be alert to the possibility of conflicts and/or mitigation. To develop a potential conflict database, areas around mile markers first defined various Montana road sections. Around each mile marker, we created a 10-mile radius buffer. 10-mile buffers have 2 major benefits: (1) they extend completely to the furthest neighboring mile marker, allowing for more complete coverage of roads between mile markers; (2) they are conservative in predicting potential species occurrences by indicating when mile markers fall within species' general distributions (i.e., they are less likely to miss rarer species). These buffered mile markers were then merged with GAP predicted species distributions via GIS.