The Study of Influence of Road Construction upon the Natural Ecosystem

• Main Authors: Kuo-hsiang Ho, 何國祥
• Other Authors: Kurt K. J. Lee
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/75991982949734643731

碩士 === 逢甲大學 === 交通工程與管理所 === 95 === There is no doubt that exploitation and development are to make a certain amount of impact on ecological environment. Among them road building can be the most serious one. Its impact on biodiversity, ecological integrity and ecological health finds no end, thus making situation go from bad to worse. However, how deep does the impact go on ecological environment remains to be explored now that no modern data are available. Kinmen, an outlying island near the estuary of the Min River, Fukien Province, is approximately 150 square kilometers, inhabited by a sparse population of 70,000. By definition a small island usually covers less than 1000 square miles in size with population less than one million. So Kinmen is a comparatively miniature island in which ecological systems are usually vulnerable and therefore subject to the invasion of the foreign species. Besides, as Kinmen went through a couple of battles, its ecological environment was totally devastated. But as luck would have it, 40 years of the military rule and forestation in the island have given the local ecological systems a chance to revive and prosper. But due to the excessive building of roads and exploitation, which lead to the destruction and depredation to the environment, the wildlife habitat has diminished, shrunk and worsened. Thus, the number of species is increasingly falling, so is the biodiversity. Road building will certainly make the integrity of forest come apart. Their impact and side effect can be invisible, intractable, and beyond repair. In addition to the instant effect upon the forest, road construction also produces the boundary effect on the animals dwelling around the two sides of road, thus driving the foreign species to invade the core areas of the forest. Because of this invasion, living-in animals, which prefer to live in the core areas of the forest, come to lose its territory of habitats. As a result, the number of living-in species is falling and even comes to vanish because of the partial extinction. The research focuses on boundary effect on the animals living around the two sides of the newly-built road near National Kinmen Institute of Technology. I keep track of the behavior of gnawing animals and insects during the various stages of road construction, hoping to learn the impact of road building on the ecology of different animals. Based on these scientific data the engineers will thus take ecological preservation into consideration in designing roads in the future. Any measures to reduce the effect on ecological system such as avoidance, mitigation and compensation will certainly be adopted so that we are able to build a road that is friendly to the natural ecosystem.