Abstract
Road networks, even in industrialized countries, become denser year after year and traffic volumes continue to increase at a steady pace. It is imperative that we monitor the impact of this trend on wildlife, but monitoring roads for flattened fauna is a time consuming effort and roadkill monitoring projects conducted up till now have been relatively small scale both in terms of time and space. This hampers the progress of road ecology analyses at the population level and at larger landscape extents. We demonstrate that citizen science projects in combination with smartphones and other new technologies allow analysis at this level and extent, and simultaneously offer more complete data for safer transportation and mitigation of roadkill hotspots. Monitoring roadkill with citizen scientists poses certain challenges regarding data quality and people management, but we show that these challenges can be addressed, which allows researchers to benefit from the many other advantages and possible applications of monitoring roadkill with citizen scientists, including raising public awareness on the matter.
Highlights
Despite the already high density of roads in industrialized countries, road length and density still increase year after year
On the basis of a project carried out in Flanders (Belgium), we demonstrate that a citizen science project based on so called roving records and transect data in combination with new tools like smartphones can take roadkill monitoring to the level
Despite its advantages for gathering large amounts of data, only in recent years the number of roadkill monitoring projects based on citizen science and web-based reporting increased rapidly and parallel with the rise of smartphones a virtual explosion of the number of smartphone apps for roadkill registration was observed (Bissonette 2014)
Summary
Despite the already high density of roads in industrialized countries, road length and density still increase year after year. E.g. in Europe the length of the motorway network increased with 68% between 1990 and Copyright DiemerVercayie, Marc Herremans. Many studies have been undertaken to investigate the number of animals killed on specific road sections, but few authors have assessed the impact of road-killed fauna at larger scale extents or at the population level (van der Ree et al 2011). Counting the number of animals crossing underpasses is not enough to assess if populations on both sides have become more viable. (...) The step is to evaluate how the density and configuration of entire road networks affect the functional relationships within and among ecosystems at the landscape scale.’
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