Roadkill

The Citizen Science App Roadkill collects entries from animals that have perished on the streets and evaluates them. With your submissions you help to protect the animals and the environment; with the help of the data obtained, hotspots are identified and defused in cooperation with NGOs and public administrations. Especially when you are out a lot in nature or in built-up areas, the app is on important companion to actively help with animal welfare and research.

Your submissions actively help in a scientific project on the subject of "Roadkills". Your entries are used to determine which animals are killed where on the streets and what reasons there might be.

What does roadkill mean?

Roadkill is the term used to describe all animals that have died in traffic. The German term Wildunfall falls short of the translation because it usually only refers to larger mammals and occasionally birds. This is also reflected in official statistics - data on animals killed in traffic are only collected on so-called "game that can be hunted". Data on all other animal species - including endangered species such as amphibians - are missing.

What is the relevance of roadkills?

Roads cut up the habitats of many animal species - ecology calls this phenomenon habitat fragmentation. Applied to human living spaces, this would mean that, for example, the connection between the kitchen and living room is crossed by a street. Animals cross streets when, for example, they are looking for food, looking for mating partners (deer that cover long distances in autumn looking for mating partners) or when they switch between winter and summer quarters (such as toads on their migration in spring). Animal species that carry out these migrations are therefore particularly often affected by roadkill.

Roadkill is also relevant for humans - animals on the road represent a great danger and also a great ethical burden for drivers. Not only collisions with large wild animals such as deer, wild boar and the like cause personal injury and property damage every year - small animals too like hedgehogs and toads can cause damage, as accidents repeatedly occur through evasive maneuvers and braking maneuvers.

Goals of the Roadkill project?

Our clear goal is to reduce the number of roadkills as much as possible by getting to the bottom of the causes of the roadkills. The first step is to get an overview of the number, scope and distribution of roadkills. By compiling a large number of individual data into a large data set, it is possible to determine exactly under which conditions (weather, time, ...), at which locations (forest, meadow, local area, ...), on which roads, which animals are victims of roadkill will.

In addition to answering these scientific questions, we are able to identify "" hotspots "", i.e. places where roadkills occur particularly frequently. In the future we will try to defuse these hotspots in cooperation with authorities, NGOs and communities.

In addition, we see the possibility that motorists will be warned of road kills precisely and depending on the time of year and time of day using modern means of communication. Similar to how navigation devices and smartphones warn of speed traps, a warning could also be given of critical road sections on which a particularly high number of road kills occur.

The overall aim of the Roadkill project is to raise awareness among all participants.

SUPPORT:

A support forum for feedback and assistance is available at www.spotteron.com.

More information can be found at www.roadkill.at