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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Darren Evans
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Street lights are not only a major source of direct light pollution emissions, but stock has been transitioning to light-emitting diode (LED) technology in many parts of the world, resulting in increases in the blue part of the visible spectrum that is more harmful to biodiversity and human health. But LEDs can be modified more easily than conventional sodium lamps by adjusting their intensity, spectral output, and other features of street light systems. In this Opinion piece, I provide an updated overview of street light mitigation strategies and contend that research in this area has been slow. I show how experimental lighting rigs that mimic real street lights can be used for mitigation testing, since invertebrate behaviour, abundances and interactions can respond quickly and measurably. I demonstrate how advances in network ecology that use species-interaction data can provide much-needed assessments of the impacts of street lights on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, and ultimately provide new tools and metrics for biomonitoring. I acknowledge the limitations of measuring local, short-term responses of biodiversity, and identify promising avenues for collaborating with industry and Government agencies in new or existing road lighting schemes, to minimise the negative long-term impacts at marginal cost.
Author(s): Evans DM
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Year: 2023
Volume: 378
Issue: 1892
Print publication date: 18/12/2023
Online publication date: 30/10/2023
Acceptance date: 07/07/2023
Date deposited: 07/07/2023
ISSN (print): 0962-8436
ISSN (electronic): 1471-2970
Publisher: The Royal Society Publishing
URL: https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0355
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2022.0355
Data Access Statement: The data used in the preliminary analysis are provided in the electronic supplementary material [59].
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