Authors: Quiles Tundidor, Pablo; Barrientos Yuste, Rafael;

The road network is an ever-growing human infrastructure with serious impacts on nature, so it is important to understand how roads influence the natural flow of ecosystems and the relationships between its components. We conducted a literature review on how species interactions can be altered by roads using on the Web of Science. We used the terms “road” and each one of the common interaction types. The initial search returned 1023 articles, that we filtered by title an abstract, finally retaining 92. The results of our search showed how some interactions have been given more attention than others and only a few of the articles revised were conducted in developing countries, where knowledge about this topic is crucial. Moreover, some specific road impacts have more representation than others, with road de-icing salts, landscape changes, road margins alterations and road noise, as the most studied impacts. Overall, we found a lack of research covering multiple taxa and their relationships, a lack of studies at a population scale and a lack of articles focused on the possible road-mediated cascade effects derived from these alterations of interspecific relationships. These gaps of knowledge may impede us to accurately mitigate the effects produced by roads.