According to the Humane Society of the United States, over a million animals are killed every day on our roads and highways. The UC Davis Road Ecology Center and the Information Center for the Environment (ICE) are collaborating to reduce this number, and have setup the California Roadkill Observation System (CROS) where citizen-based observations of vehicle related animal deaths can be recorded and stored. By recording vehicle related deaths, "hot spots" will become more identifiable, and ways to mitigate the stretch of road can be addressed.
On September 13th, the CROS project was featured in a New York Times article (technology and science sections). During the day, the website saw a tremendous increase in traffic, which including many new registered users and email correspondence from people applauding our efforts. This national attention has draw a lot of interest from people, many who would like such a system in their home state. We are currently supporting sites in California and in Maine. The Maine Audubon Wildlife Road Watch was built in collaboration with Maine Audubon.
The website has been running for a little more than a year, and has logged over 7000 observations from across the state. Surprisingly, more than 32% of the observations have been entered by a core set of volunteers. We are especially grateful for their effort in helping kick-start this project with a solid set of data to draw upon.
Links:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/technology/13roadkill.html
http://www.wildlifecrossing.net/california/
http://www.wildlifecrossing.net/maine/
