摘要：Road ecology has developed into a significant branch of ecology with steady growth in thenumber of refereed journal articles, books, conferences, symposia, and "best practice" guidelines beingproduced each year. The main objective of this special issue of Ecology and Society is to highlight the needfor studies that document the population, community, and ecosystem-level effects of roads and traffic bypublishing studies that document these effects. It became apparent when compiling this special issue thatthere is a paucity of studies that explicitly examined higher order effects of roads and traffic. No paperson landscape function or ecosystem-level effects were submitted, despite being highlighted as a priorityfor publication. The 17 papers in this issue, from Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, and USA, all deal tosome extent with either population or community-level effects of roads and traffic. Nevertheless, manyhigher order effects remain unquantified, and must become the focus of future studies because thecomplexity and interactions among the effects of roads and traffic are large and potentially unexpected.An analysis of these complex interrelations requires systematic research, and it is necessary to furtherestablish collaborative links between ecologists and transportation agencies. Many road agencies have"environmental sustainability" as one of their goals and the only way to achieve such goals is for them tosupport and foster long-term and credible scientific research. The current situation, with numerous small-scale projects being undertaken independently of each other, cannot provide the information required toquantify and mitigate the negative effects of roads and traffic on higher levels. The future of road ecologyresearch will be best enhanced when multiple road projects in different states or countries are combinedand studied as part of integrated, well-replicated research projects
