“We aren’t the problem, it’s the out of towners that are the issue!”
Wouldn’t we all like to believe so much.
But in reality the roads taking folks all over JT and to/from Vegas cut the land into ~6 massive lattice cells. Those roads have basically 0 impact on turtle populations because their linear nature makes them effectively insignificant at the scale of the desert. On the other hand, the land ownership grid gives rise to a space-filling-curve of road that dominates the affected landscape and an effectively infinite number of microscopic lattice cells that are too small to support any population, and thus force the animals to migrate over roads constantly.
Wouldn’t we all like to believe so much.
But in reality the roads taking folks all over JT and to/from Vegas cut the land into ~6 massive lattice cells. Those roads have basically 0 impact on turtle populations because their linear nature makes them effectively insignificant at the scale of the desert. On the other hand, the land ownership grid gives rise to a space-filling-curve of road that dominates the affected landscape and an effectively infinite number of microscopic lattice cells that are too small to support any population, and thus force the animals to migrate over roads constantly.