To understand California wildlife, researchers study roadkill. Here’s what it tells us.
The Road Ecology Center at UC Davis attempts to quantify the effect our driving has on wildlife in its annual roadkill report. Its most recent findings, released in late September, point to “excessive rates of traffic collisions” as one possible factor in the population decline of some of the Golden State’s iconic wildlife.
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@truthseqr
I wonder why they are not using the iNaturalist California State Roadkill project.
Always wondered that myself. A disregard of good data, considering iNat observations use animals from insects to mammals.
@joerich, @biohexx1, what makes you think they're not? I'm pretty sure they host this very iNat project; surely these iNat data go into the larger database.
@twillrichardson @biohexx1 I believe you are correct, it appears that UC Davis Roadkill Ecology Center is behind the iNaturalist California State Roadkill project. However, when you read the article, they say the sources of their data are: "And that’s just the number of deaths reported by state agencies, by the public to an online database and to insurance companies." When you click on the online database it only shows ways to enter data on that page, it does not reference iNaturalist as a method to submit data. Nor does their scientific paper in Frontiers "Large Extent Volunteer Roadkill and Wildlife Observation Systems as Sources of Reliable Data" published in 2017 reference iNaturalist. But when I open the California State Roadkill project (https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/california-state-roadkill), it takes me to an iNaturalist project page naming both UC Davis and California Roadkill Observation System (CROS). It also allows me to view my observations - I think these are in an iNaturalist database, not in the CROS database. I am happy that CROS use my data, however, I do think it is improper for them to use data collected under iNaturalist without giving iNaturalist specific credit as a source in publications.
I began this project in the hopes that CROS would use this data. They do not use it, but they are aware of it.
Interesting. There is another project, California invasives, which I have started using to place observations of noxious invasive plants, such as Stinkwort. I recently saw something on Facebook, I believe from Calflora, asking people to submit their observations of Stinkwort on their site. I wrote them and told them about iNat and they wrote back saying that I could transfer my iNat observations to their site. I don't understand this but I think people are being very parochial. This is a real waste of good scientific data. In fact, for invasives, all an organization needs to do is to search with the invasive filter active. I did that for my observations and find that about 20% of my total observations are invasives - I think if I concentrated on plants, the number would be greater.
I agree. In any event, the data is on iNat for some grad-student or motivated citizen-scientist to write an article.
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