KINGSTON, R.I. – April 2, 2025 – According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, there are more than one million wildlife vehicle collisions in the United States annually with significant personal and economic costs: they result in approximately 200 deaths and 26,000 injuries to drivers and passengers and cost more than $8 billion annually. Kathleen Carroll, assistant professor of applied quantitative ecology in the University of Rhode Island’s Department of Natural Resources Science, is working on a solution to make roads safer for both wildlife and humans that will utilize the help of citizen scientists.

Rhode Islanders can now report roadkill that they hit or observe using a QR-code generated survey, also available online. The public’s participation will ultimately inform research efforts to mitigate risks for both drivers and animals.

“If we identify key hotspots for roadkill, we can advise the Rhode Island Department of Transportation on ways to increase successful wildlife crossings,” Carroll says. Usage of the survey is anonymous. With permission, it will pull the respondent’s GPS location but no personal data.

The pervasive problem of roadkill illuminates larger concerns about wildlife connectivity, the ability for animals to move freely from place to place. In western states, known migration pathways have informed efforts to facilitate safe movement through large underpasses and overpasses. We have eight of the ten most densely populated states in the northeast, Carroll notes, and the abundance of roadways and cities creates certain concerns. “Here we have animals moving around, but we don’t have massive ungulate or mammal migrations, so we don’t have giant wildlife bridges or other things that work out west,” Carroll says. “There have been a lot of discussions about what is important when we start thinking about connectivity in New England specifically.” 

Data from the survey will complement research conducted by Carroll’s graduate students that uses camera trap data to record animals’ usage of culverts. “We know that animals are willing to use culverts, as opposed to crossing on the road, because they don’t want to be somewhere they’re going to die,” Carroll says. “So what is it about some culverts that makes them willing to use it as opposed to others?” Identifying what’s happening spatially at culvert sites provides crucial information on predicting animal behavior before fatal road crossings.

The data from the Rhode Kill Survey will be paired with traditional data collection methods: graduate students in Carroll’s Quest Lab will complete surveys that utilize standardized effort, driving the same amount of distance from randomly assigned starting points and then pulling off the road to pick up roadkill for assessment of species, age, sex, and other identifications.

“It will ensure the patterns we’re seeing in the citizen science data match the pattern in the data we’re collecting,” Carroll says.

The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management and the popular GPS app Waze currently collect roadkill data, but it’s very disparate. Carroll and the team are interested in establishing a data-sharing agreement to ensure all collected data can be used more effectively to mitigate risks.

While the survey is in its early days, there is already growing interest in the work, including from the New York Department of Transportation.

“We’re starting with Rhode Island to pilot it,” Carroll says, “but the goal is to expand it to other regions.” Establishing a standardized protocol that all states follow will allow data to be integrated for a larger analysis. Carroll notes that the research team might also add more questions over time to expand the information captured with the hopes of being more broadly beneficial to a variety of research goals.

The only required question on the Rhode Kill Survey is whether or not the animal was a deer. Additional optional questions include the ability to upload a photo and to participate in a follow-up driving survey. The latter is particularly useful to researchers, Carroll notes, because it provides information about the level of effort and driving habits of respondents.

“In the field of ecology, we’ve demonstrated that historically, citizen science data is essential for large-scale projects,” Carroll adds. The survey will remain open for the foreseeable future.

For questions, or to receive a bumper sticker with a QR code to the survey, contact Kathleen Carroll.

This story was written by Anna Gray in the College of the Environment and Life Sciences.