摘要：Habitat fragmentation continues to occur despite increasing evidence of its adverse effectson ecosystems. One of the major detrimental effects of roads and traffic is the creation of barriers or filtersto the movement of wildlife, ultimately disconnecting some populations. Our understanding of the extentto which roads reduce the movement of biota is mostly based on field-based observational methods ofinferring animal movement, and to a much smaller extent, on allele frequency-based genetic analyses.Field-based methods, as it is typically feasible to apply them, tend to be informative at fine temporal andspatial scales. Allele frequency-based genetic methods are informative at broad geographic scales but attimescales usually greater than recent disturbance events. Contemporary analyses based on genotypes ofindividual organisms (called "genotypic" approaches herein) can augment these other approaches. Theycan be informative at fine spatial and temporal scales, are readily scaled up, and are complementary to theother field-based approaches. In genotypic analyses, every capture can be effectively a recapture, relievinga major limitation in sample size. They can evaluate the influence of even recently constructed roads onmovements and their emergent effects on important population processes at the spatial and temporal scalesof interest to wildlife and infrastructure managers. Information derived from genetic and field-basedmethods can be used to model the viability of populations influenced by roads and to evaluate and monitormitigation efforts. Despite some excellent examples, we suggest that such applications are still rare relativeto their potential. This paper emphasizes some of the detailed inferences that can be made using differenttypes of genetic analyses, and suggests paths by which researchers in road ecology can incorporate geneticapproaches. We recommend that the proven capacities of genetic techniques be routinely explored asapproaches to quantify the diverse influences of roads on wildlife populations. With appropriate expertise,molecular ecology can be done extremely inexpensively. It is conducted within the same fundingframeworks as field-based approaches and, in budgeting funding applications, molecular ecologymaintenance costs are about 20–30% of payroll, in line with other disciplines and approaches. This andother common arguments against application of genetic approaches are often based on misconceptions, orlimitations that no longer apply
