Road Kill Citizen Science App "Splatter Spotter": Safer Cities for All Species

Rotting animal carcasses? Yeah, my response would be avoidance at all costs.
 
At the Chautauqua Series lecture at Temescal Gateway Park on Tuesday night, Cal State Channel Islands professor Sean Anderson spent the better part of the evening convincing visitors otherwise. It helps that his organization, the Pacific Institute for Restoration Ecology, is also known as PIRatE.

According to Anderson, there's about a 1 in 10 chance you'll see road kill during a mile of driving in Southern California. For every ten miles you travel by road, you're more likely than not to be driving past a dead animal.

Anderson wants to learn more about exactly how much road kill is happening, and how we can build cities and roads that will minimally harm animal populations. And he's recruiting you (Me? Well, mostly your smartphone) to help.

Why bother?

"Interaction with a vehicle is as dangerous for you as it is for the critter," Anderson says of incidents with larger animals.

Accidents are most likely to occur now- in the late summer and early fall- when young animals born in the springtime are 'leaving the nest' for the first time.

For some animals, vehicle incidents are the biggest source of mortality, causing more deaths than hunting, predation, and natural causes.

Southern California barn owls, known for their stealthy predatory nocturnal dives, are most likely to die from... well, being so good at darting in that drivers don't have time to change course.

Barn Owl by Andrew Dowsett, on Flickr

Members of an endangered black bear subspecies in Florida are prone to meeting their end on smaller roads, which lack the sound walls and human activity that would typically deter them. For these black bears, contact with vehicles is also the primary source of mortality.

Florida Black Bear by Jax Strong, on Flickr

Preventing incidents is a challenge for city planners. People notoriously habituate to warnings presented on signs. Anderson says, "We're all guilty of this. We do our regular routine and we tune out the noise, and these signs become like the noise."

The most effective interventions, like building roads that go over existing wildlife areas, or building culverts beneath structures, are also the most costly. Systems that trigger traffic signals when animals are in the road are also a significant investment for taxpayers.

Anderson is quick to admit that road kill tends to register low on the city planning priority list . His own projects on Southern California road kill have not received funding- he's collected the data independently, and with the help of his undergrads.

To amp up data collection, Anderson has turned to citizen science, to harness the power of crowdsourcing.* His Cal State Channel Islands undergrads have developed an iPhone app (available soon for Android) called Splatter Spotter. Participants use their phones' GPS trackers to identify road kill they notice, as well as journeys in which they encounter no road kill, to help Anderson amass the data he needs.

Splatter Spotter has been downloaded in over 30 countries.

Here's Anderson explaining how Splatter Spotter works.

Original video

In considering the broader impact of roads, Anderson says, "Something that is not really well appreciated is that the road or the trail is never the width of the road or the trail. It's always expanding. The ecological effect zone is wide."

Putting in a road fragments animal populations, facilitates invasive species, and usually signals the beginning of urban development, pollution, and resource extraction. Anderson says, "This notion of the road as the first step is this ubiquitous phenomenon we see around the world."

People who try the app self-report a greater awareness of roads and roadkill, and might be more likely to think more deeply about the environmental impacts of road development.

Original video

*Most widely known for its citizen science endeavors is Galaxy Zoo, a project that turns to amateurs (which, to date, have included my eighth grade students) to provide detailed descriptive information about the billions of galaxies that astronomers have photographed. Galaxy Zoo has led to numerous journal publications on the structures of galaxies.