flattenedFauna
A FAIR-adjacent repository for wildlife-vehicle collision mortality data.
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A FAIR-adjacent repository for wildlife-vehicle collision mortality data.
Last updated
Was this helpful?
Lillian Curanzy | Christy McDaniel | Andrew Mckanna-Foster
Wildlife vehicle collisions have been documented since the 1920’s (Stoner, 1925), but until recently most of this work was completed with pencil and paper, then reentered in a database (Huijser, 2007). The distribution of roadkill provides useful information for mitigation projects, such as exclusion fencing (Olson et al., 2014), but can also be used for general population studies or to set hunting limits (McCurry-Schmidt, 2010). Today, mobile apps are beginning to be used for data collection, and the rise of citizen science initiatives has been shown to be accurate and effective (Waetjen and Shilling, 2017). There are a multitude of data collection efforts from researchers, government departments, and volunteers, occurring at local, state, national, and even global scales. While these datasets have proved their importance in the scientific literature, there is no standard data collection protocol, a common repository, or a curation protocol. The flattenedFauna Repository serves as a collection point for these datasets to facilitate reuse and ensure preservation.
‌•Aggregating available data in one location
•Suggesting a standard set of data variables for future data collection
•Establishing a curation protocol to make data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR).
flattenedFauna accepts all wildlife-vehicle collision mortality data collected from within the U.S. and Canada.
There are numerous sources of roadkill data encompassing a variety of timespans, geographic and political boundaries, and levels of completeness. Below are examples of contributors and possible contributors to the fF Repository.
