The Taiwan Roadkill Observation Network, a citizen science initiative, has over the past nine years recorded nearly 150,000 instances of roadkill, helping officials create better policies for environmental protection, traffic safety and disease prevention.
The strategy can help researchers overcome labor, time, regional or other limitations to collecting sufficient amounts of data.
Project head Lin Te-en (林德恩), an assistant researcher at the Council of Agriculture’s Endemic Species Research Institute, on Sunday said that traffic accidents provide the easiest opportunity to discover creatures previously unknown to scientists.
Photo courtesy of the Forestry Bureau, the Council of Agriculture
Taiwan has a number of rare animals that “researchers have never seen alive, only dead,” Lin said.
For example, while the institute has spent 16 years surveying highly elusive snakes, it has only found about 4,000 live specimens, but in just nine years, the network found nearly 40,000 of the snakes killed on roads, he said.
With this massive amount of data, researchers are able to derive important information about the creatures, he added.
For example, researchers previously believed that the invasive green iguana was only found in Tainan, Kaohsiung and Pingtung County, but last year, the network in just a short time found three of the iguanas in Taitung County, Lin said.
This shows that they have already established themselves in the area, he said, adding that the local government should implement emergency measures to stem their spread.
Of the roadkill recorded by the network, 35 percent were reptiles, nearly 30 percent were amphibians and 20 percent were mammals.
The large amount of data on reptile roadkill has become the basis for the government’s conservation strategy, Lin said.
Based on the information, it has raised the threat level for the Chinese box turtle and yellow pond turtle to endangered, while other creatures have been removed from the protected species list as their numbers have increased, he added.
The Directorate-General of Highways and the Freeway Bureau has used the data to determine where to place animal crossing signs, as well as protective fencing and biological corridors, the network said.
The Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine also uses the roadkill found by the network as valuable samples in the study of infectious diseases, such as rabies and avian influenza, it added.
The network has been organizing annual meetings to analyze results and plans to release its first national year-end report next year to provide roadkill data to government agencies and the public, Lin said.
Since the animals in many of the photographs taken by participants are difficult to identify, the network also plans to offer a second level of training to teach volunteers how to identify animals from skulls, scales and feathers, he added.
“Through shared intelligence, we can work together to help these wild animals find the ‘right path,’” Lin said.
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