PDF(Pubmed)
Abstract：
The disturbance of infrastructures may affect biological communities that are exposed to them. This study assesses the impact of high-speed (highway and railway) infrastructures in a protected study site, the Natural Reserve Fontanili di Corte Valle Re (Emilia-Romagna, Italy). We compared bird diversity with sound intensity and frequency in three sampling areas, increasingly distant from the infrastructures at the border with the reserve, during the last 4 years (2019-2022), monitoring sedentary, nesting, and migratory bird species. We hypothesize a decreasing diversity closer to the source of disturbance, which is mostly attributable to noise pollution. Our findings confirmed this trend, and we show that, in particular, disturbance seems to influence species richness more than the total abundance of birds. We also discovered that highway disturbance was much higher than railway in terms of frequency and duration. In light of these results, we suggest that some species, which have a behavioral ecology strongly based on singing to communicate with each other for their reproductive and defensive strategies, may suffer more from constant acoustic disturbance. The installation of effective noise barriers to shield the sound produced by the highways should be considered a mandatory request not only in proximity to houses but also in the vicinity of protected areas.
摘要：
基础设施的干扰可能会影响暴露于基础设施的生物群落。本研究评估了受保护研究地点的高速（公路和铁路）基础设施的影响，自然保护区FontanilidiCorteValleRe（艾米利亚-罗马涅，意大利）。我们比较了三个采样区域的鸟类多样性与声音强度和频率，越来越远离保护区边界的基础设施，在过去4年(2019-2022年)，监视久坐，嵌套,和候鸟物种。我们假设多样性的减少更接近扰动源，这主要是由于噪音污染。我们的发现证实了这一趋势，我们证明了，特别是,干扰似乎对物种丰富度的影响大于对鸟类总丰度的影响。我们还发现，就频率和持续时间而言，公路扰动远高于铁路。鉴于这些结果,我们建议一些物种，它们具有强烈基于唱歌的行为生态，以相互交流其生殖和防御策略，可能会受到更多持续的声学干扰。安装有效的隔音屏障以屏蔽高速公路产生的声音，不仅在房屋附近，而且在保护区附近，都应被视为强制性要求。
