In the United States, it is estimated that more than one million vertebrate animals are killed by vehicle collisions every day. Yet, despite the ubiquity of roadkill, there is actually little comprehensive data on how many animals are killed by cars every year. The U.S. has no national database for roadkill, and most states don’t have good systems for tracking it either. Many roadkill incidents go unreported.
Citizen science projects are trying to fill in those gaps by asking volunteers to note and report roadkill they find. While it’s impossible for researchers to track all of the roadkill incidents themselves, an army of volunteers spread out across the country, keeping an eye on the same roads they already drive, could offer better data. You can find one such project, called Roadkill Reports, on SciStarter, along with thousands of other citizen science projects.
“I started Roadkill Reports as a project for ...
