Roadkill: Scientific Publishing with Citizen Scientists

Every day thousands of animals are killed by road traffic. The Roadkill project is dedicated to finding solutions to this multifaceted problem. Now a new opportunity is being created for the public to collaborate even more closely with the scientific community in this project. An ordinary morning, I am on my way to work by car and my thoughts are already on the tasks that arise today. Already from a distance I see a brownish something lying on the road. I slow down slightly and approach the now clearly visible ball of fur. Slowly I drive past it and a feeling of inner shiver combined with strong compassion overwhelms me at the sight. Again a young fox was hit by a vehicle driving along some time before me and was transformed into a mass of fur, blood and bones. A living being can hardly be connected to it anymore and already the feeling of compassion turns into anger and thirst for action. The urge to change something about these terrible situations that I and with me all those who are on the road have to observe every day. A first step towards this is to get an overview of where which kind of animals are road -killed. For this purpose, the Roadkill project was founded in 2014, where each of us can report when he or she sees a roadkill. Since then, more than 800 people have reported more than 13,000 animals and we have been able to publish four scientific articles on the subject. In an FWF-funded project, everyone will now be able to analyse the animals reported in the Roadkill project, develop their own research questions based on the data and send them to the project team. Each year, all those who have submitted a research question or reported animals will select a research question and develop it into a scientific project. This project should help to find out which factors influence, where animals are often roadkilled and why. Our vision is to collaborate intensively with all those involved in the project from data collection to publication in order to make our scientific work even more open and collaborative. In this new project, we hope to work together with many interested parties in order to create new knowledge through new research questions, which will enable us to find new solutions to the problem of roadkill. We therefore cordially invite you to take advantage of the many new possibilities that are being developed in this project and to do science together with us, so that in the future you will no longer be confronted with dead animals on roads every day.