Audience and User Stories

Audience

The audience for the flattenedFauna Repository is any person or organization interested in creating or using data of animal mortalities caused by moving vehicles. This may include governmental departments, researchers, civilians, citizen scientists, and businesses.

User Community

Data associated with roadway wildlife mortality is collected by a variety of agencies, institutions, and interest groups. This diversity in collection informs the large spectrum of domain data users; including those in academia, government, law enforcement, private enterprise, and civil communities. More specifically, this data is used to support projects like traffic safety policy-making, actuarial analysis, biodiversity tracking, and countless research initiatives.

User	Need	Example	Outcome
Law Enforcement	Statistics for planning and training	It is thought that local motorists are intentionally harming certain protected predator species with their vehicles. By extrapolating trends in roadkill occurrences by species and location, law enforcement officers can design patrol routes accordingly.	It is found that road mortality increases after suspected livestock depredation. This causes law enforcement to further explore this possible link.
Government Departments	Statistics for resource allocation, natural resource policy and planning	A fish and game department is analyzing its own roadkill data for game animals (like deer) and wants to compare it to other areas.	Understanding how many game animals other states lose to roadkill helps the department better interpret their results and leads to better decision making.
Citizen Scientists	Visible evidence of the bigger picture	A homeowner sees a lot of roadkill while commuting and wants to know if this is being tracked, and if not, what options are available to start tracking it.	Seeing that no one is tracking roadkill on that commuting route, the citizen scientist signs up with AdventureScientists and adds effort to collecting quality roadkill data.
Researchers	Ecological research	A team of ecologists is investigating the impacts of an introduced predator on a fragile ecosystem. A comprehensive analysis of roadkill data reveals a 94% decrease in native mammal roadkill observations since the estimated introduction period.	Clear evidence of the drop in the native mammal populations increases researchers’ success at getting grants to fully fund further work.
Insurance Companies	Risk assessment	An insurance company prepares an annual report of regional collision incidents that impacts rate inflation. Vehicle-wildlife collision data is one of the analyzed collision data subsets.	The company is able to adjust rates to give some vehicle owners lower premiums.
Citizens	Local data for community use or personal projects	A concerned scout troop is lobbying for the installation of a pedestrian/wildlife overpass. By easily accessing a wide variety of local roadkill data, the scouts are able to effectively communicate the issue to the City Council.	The City Council invests in wildlife crossing signs and begins planning work for an overpass.