Are largescale citizen science data precise enough to determine roadkill patterns?

Roads are one of the most transforming linear infrastructures in human-dominated landscapes, with animal road-kills as their most studied impact. Therefore, there is the need to gather road-kill data and in this sense, citizen science is gaining popularity as an easy and cheap source of data collection that allows large scale studies that may otherwise be unattainable. However, citizen science projects that focus on road-kills tends to be geographically localised, therefore, there is a debate about whether large-scale data collected by citizen scientists can identify spatial and temporal road-kill patterns, and thus, be used as a reliable conservation tool. We aim to assess whether citizen science data contained in the Spanish Atlas of Terrestrial Mammals (henceforth “Atlas”), can be as valuable and accurate as road-kill surveys undertaken by experts in detecting road-kill hotspots and establishing road-kill rates for different species of carnivores. Using Linear Models, we compared species-richness, diversity and abundance of road-killed carnivores between Atlas data and our own road-kill survey database. We also compared (per species) the observed road-kills in our road survey with the expected road-kills based on the species abundance from the Atlas. In our Linear Models we did not find a significant relation between the road-kill data and the Atlas data. This suggests that data from the Atlas are unsuitable to determine road-kills patterns in our study area. This could be due to the lack of control over the sampling effort in the Atlas data, and the fact that the Atlas has a sampling scope that is not fitted for road mortality studies. When we compared observed road-kills (per species) with those expected based on Atlas abundance, we found that some species are road-killed more (or less) than expected. This may be due to ecological or behavioural traits that make some species more (or less) prone to be road-killed. To summarize, our findings suggest that occurrence in Atlas data does not mirror road-kill patterns, likely due to both several biases in Atlas data and to species-specific responses to roads. Thus, to study road-kill rates and patterns, we suggest the use classical road-kill surveys, unless correcting approaches to citizen science datasets are applied. This is especially important when the study aims to determine species’ specific road-kill patterns.

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Date of creation 2024-09-17
Date of last revision 2024-09-17
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Metadata identifier 4569d894-a28e-572b-8934-c9603c456aaa
Metadata language Spanish
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ISO 19115 topic category biota
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INSPIRE identifier ESPMITECOIEPNBFRAGM698
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Geographic identifier Spain
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"{\"type\": \"Polygon\", \"coordinates\": [[[-18.16, 27.64], [4.32, 27.64], [4.32, 43.79], [-18.16, 43.79], [-18.16, 27.64]]]}"
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  1. 2020 IENE International Conference. Abstract book. Vol. 5.2.2
  2. Num. 1
  3. pag. 142
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Name of the dataset creator Quiles, P., Ascensão, F., D'Amico, M., Revilla, E. y Barrientos, R.
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