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12 November 2020 No clear effect of odour repellents on roe deer behaviour in the vicinity of roads
Michal Bíl, Tomáš Kušta, Richard Andrášik, Vojtěch Cícha, Hana Brodská, Miloš Ježek, Zdeněk Keken
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Abstract

Ungulate–vehicle collisions pose a traffic safety issue as well as wildlife-conservation issues in many countries. While fences are recommended as reliable safety measures for motorways and other high-traffic volume roads, no generally accepted measures of the same efficiency are available for secondary roads. Odour repellents are applied in many central European countries, but contradictory results are available concerning their efficiency. We tested the effect of odour repellents on both a crossing frequency and the presence near roads of six individuals of roe deer over a period of five months (April–August 2019). The odour repellents were installed along two secondary roads, and along two semi-open habitats (forest–meadow and forest–arable land) alternately, in several phases. Two hypotheses were tested. The first one focused on the change in animal presence close to the profiles where the odours were applied, while the second hypothesis concerned a change in the number of crossings of the same profiles. The results demonstrate that no clear effect of odour repellents on roe deer behaviour in both hypotheses were obtained. Apart from the obtained results, we discuss the importance of the methodology. We conclude that this kind of study design is extremely sensitive to a number of factors with a potentially negative influence on the course of the study design.

© 2020 The Authors. This is an Open Access article This work is licensed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY). The license permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Michal Bíl, Tomáš Kušta, Richard Andrášik, Vojtěch Cícha, Hana Brodská, Miloš Ježek, and Zdeněk Keken "No clear effect of odour repellents on roe deer behaviour in the vicinity of roads," Wildlife Biology 2020(4), wlb.00744-, (12 November 2020). https://doi.org/10.2981/wlb.00744
Accepted: 25 September 2020; Published: 12 November 2020
KEYWORDS
Animal
roadkill
STUDY DESIGN
wildlife
wildlife–vehicle collisions
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