Week 5 - Flora & Fauna

The nature and quality of the ecology in an area will determine the effects of activities such as building roads.  Activities affecting flora and fauna include:

• Roads / Transport (Fragmentation / Safety)
• Developments (invasive species)
• Coastal infrastructure (marine impacts)
• Water infrastructure (habitat disturbance/ Discharges)
• Agriculture / Farming (biodiversity)
• Power infrastructure (Bird strike)
• Mining (Tailings- Acid)
• Discharges (from all sources e.g. spills)

Fragmentation can present a large problem when building transportation routes.  This may cause:

• Separation of ecological communities from new roads through the physical barrier they represent
• Change of nature of the physical environment – habitat impacts (for example, if you build a road through an area where there are natural predators than they may follow the route of the road which changes its behaviour).
• Increases in pedestrian or road traffic resulting in dispersal of weeds and pest species.  Railways in particular are responsible for transport and distributing weeds over a large area.

The second image shows an area called Smith's Bush on Auckland's North Shore which was fragmented by a road.  Studies since then have observed the gradual decline of the biodiversity on the right of the road.