Comparing Road-Kill Datasets from Hunters and Citizen Scientists in a Landscape Context

Abstract

Abstract:Road traffic has severe effects on animals, especially when road-kills are involved. In many countries, official road-kill data are provided by hunters or police; there are also road-kill observations reported by citizen scientists. The aim of the current study was to test whether road-kill reports by hunters stem from similar landscapes than those reported by citizen scientists. We analysed the surrounding landscapes of 712 road-kill reportings of European hares in the province of Lower Austria. Our data showed that road-killed hares reported both by hunters and citizens are predominantly surrounded by arable land. No difference of hedges and solitary trees could be found between the two datasets. However, significant differences in landcover classes and surrounding road networks indicate that hunters' and citizen scientists' data are different. Hunters reported hares from landscapes with significantly higher percentages of arable land, and greater lengths of secondary roads. In contrast, citizens reported hares from landscapes with significantly higher percentages of urban or industrial areas and greater lengths of motorways, primary roads, and residential roads. From this we argue that hunters tend to report data mainly from their hunting areas, whereas citizens report data during their daily routine on the way to/from work. We conclude that a citizen science approach is an important source for road-kill data when used in addition to official data with the aim of obtaining an overview of road-kill events on a landscape scale.

Amphibian and reptile road-kills on tertiary roads in relation to landscape structure: using a citizen science approach with open-access land cover data

“…In the citizen science project volunteers collect presence only data of all vertebrate species killed on roads [35, 40]. The app was not adjusted to our approach but rather used as data collection tool in a more systematic way.…”

Sistema Urubu: A Ciência Cidadã Em Prol Da Conservação Da Biodiversidade

“…No caso de projetos de ciência cidadã para monitoramento de fauna atropelada, quando estes envolvem o uso de aplicativos de celular como forma de coleta de dados, é possível que os mesmos sejam georreferenciados no ato da coleta (HEIGL et al, 2016;VERCAYIE;HERREMANS, 2015). Isso melhora expressivamente a qualidade dos dados, aumentando a precisão e favorecendo para que haja a diminuição dos erros e a padronização da coleta (OLSON et al, 2014).…”

The Role of Citizen Science in Earth Observation

“…The article by Heigl et al [22] compares roadkill data collected by citizens with data collected by hunters for hares killed in Lower Austria. The authors used road network data from OSM, Corine Land Cover products and aerial photography to manually map structural landscape elements.…”

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