Roadkill

Aims

Our clear aim is to reduce the number of roadkills as much as possible by getting to the bottom of the causes of roadkills.

The first step is to get an overview of the number, extent and distribution of roadkills in Austria. By compiling many individual data into one large data set, we aim to determine under which conditions (weather, time of day, ...), at which locations (forest, meadow, local area, ...), on which roads, which animals become victims of roadkill.

In addition to answering these scientific questions, we would like to identify "hotspots", i. e. places where roadkill is particularly frequent. In the future, we will try to mitigate these hotspots in cooperation with authorities, NGOs and communities.

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

Why participate in this research?

Ask a research question

In the Research Question section, we collect all questions, sort them, develop them into research topics, and then release these topics for voting so that we can decide together in the community which topics to pursue in further research. We invite everyone to participate in the voting and also to collaborate in the following steps as we work on research topics and move forward together to a publication, creating new knowledge.

So, as you can see, your question can potentially be very important in advancing research on roadkills. Your ideas provide new impetus and are valuable to the scientific community. In this way, we would like to bring your local expertise to the development of the project and thus conduct research that is supported by the community.

Report Roadkills

At the heart of the Roadkill project are reports of roadkill using apps or online forms. The reports are made by citizen scientists who see roadkilled animals on their daily routes and report them. It is important that only vertebrates that have clearly been killed by road traffic are reported.

All questions and analyses in the project are based on your reports. This means that your reports are used in scientific studies on the one hand, but on the other hand they are also available for our cooperation partners to derive possible conservation measures.

Check roadkills

You can see every report immediately on our online map and also comment on it if there are any ambiguities, e.g. if a report was not marked on a road, the animal was identified incorrectly or it might not be a roadkill at all. If you notice something about a report, we invite you to comment on it in a polite and appreciative manner directly at the report. This way you help to keep the quality of the reports on a high level.

In the project, people with different knowledge help each other. For example, if you are particularly knowledgeable about mammals, we invite you to help others in the community identify mammals by commenting on mammal reports. This way you can share your knowledge and other citizen scientists will learn through you which animals they have found.

Analyze Roadkills

All reports are displayed in our online map. This online map includes numerous functions in the app, but also on the website, to sort, filter and analyze the reports according to your own preferences. You can find out which options there are exactly and how to use them in the Analyze Roadkills section.

On the one hand, these functions allow you to dive deeper into the project, to deal with the topic of roadkill more intensively, or simply to deal with the previous reports out of interest. If you come up with ideas for new questions during your analysis or if you discover regularities or correlations in the reports, we invite you to send them to us via our form. Your ideas will help advance the research on roadkills.

Publish openly

In our project it is very important to us to work transparently. Therefore, all results are made freely available. For example, you will receive weekly updates on the status of reports, every three months we publish our newsletter and a summary of the results in the basic analyses, and once a year we analyze the roadkill reports, focusing on detailed information about the surrounding landscapes of the five most frequently reported species and the type of road on which the animals were reported. Of course, all of our scientific articles are also freely available and additionally summarized in German on our website. This way you will be extensively informed about the steps and results that were made possible with your contribution. As described in the section Publishing Openly, we also invite you to participate in the publication process with your ideas, comments and critical remarks.

Podcast episode

In February 2023, project coordinator Florian Heigl and Daniel Dörler from the project team were guests on the Österreich forscht podcast "Wissen macht Leute" - you can listen to the episode here (in German). 

Citizen Science Seminar

In 2022, poject coordinator Florian Heigl held a lecture about the project Roadkill (in German) as part of the lecture series "Citizen Science Seminar" at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna (BOKU). Here, you can watch the video recording of the lecture: