Why join the research?

Ask a research question

In the Ask a Research Question section, we collect all the questions, sort them, develop them into research topics, and then release them for voting so that we can decide together in the community which topics will be researched further. We invite everyone to participate in the voting and also to collaborate in the following steps as we work on research topics and move forward together to a publication, creating new knowledge. 

So you can see that your question can potentially be very important in advancing research on roadkills. Your ideas provide new impetus and are valuable to the scientific community. In this way, we would like to bring your local expertise to the development of the project and thus conduct research that is supported by the community.

Report Roadkills

At the heart of the Roadkill project are reports of roadkill using apps or online forms. The reports are made by Citizen Scientists who see roadkill animals on their daily routes and report them. It is important that only vertebrates that have clearly been killed by road traffic are reported. 

All questions and analyses in the project are based on your reports. This means that your reports are used in scientific studies on the one hand, but on the other hand they are also available for our cooperation partners to derive possible conservation measures.

Check roadkills

You can see every report immediately on our online map and can help us to check it.

On the one hand, you can indicate directly under the photo of the animal whether the spot is correct. By clicking on the tick or the cross you can help to speed up the verification of the reports and at the same time give quick feedback to the citizen scientists whether their entry is correct.

If there is any ambiguity, you can also comment, e.g. if a report was not drawn on a road, the animal was wrongly identified or it might not be a roadkill at all. If you notice something about a report, we invite you to comment on it in a polite and appreciative manner directly with the report. This way you help to keep the quality of the reports on a high level.

In the project, people with different knowledge help together. For example, if you are particularly knowledgeable about mammals, we invite you to help others in the community identify mammals by commenting on mammal reports. This way you can share your knowledge and other Citizen Scientists will learn through you what animals they have found. 

Analyse Roadkills

All reports are displayed in our online map. This online map includes in the app, but also on the website, numerous functions to sort, filter and analyze the reports according to your own preferences. You can find out exactly which options are available and how to use them in the Analyse Roadkills section.

On the one hand, these functions allow you to dive deeper into the project, to deal with the topic of roadkill more intensively, or simply to explore the previous reports out of interest. If you come up with ideas for new questions during your analysis or if you discover regularities or correlations in the reports, we invite you to report them to us via our form. Your ideas will help advance the research on roadkills.

Publish openly

In our project it is very important to us to work transparently. Therefore, all results are made freely available. For example, you will receive weekly updates in German on the status of reports, every three months we publish our newsletter and a summary of the results in the basic analyses, and once a year we analyze the roadkill reports, focusing on detailed information about the surrounding landscapes of the five most frequently reported species and the type of road on which the animals were reported. Of course, all of our scientific articles are also made freely available and additionally summarized in German on our website. This way, you will be extensively informed about which steps and results were made possible with your contribution. As described in the section Publish Openly, we also invite you to participate in the publication process with your ideas, comments and critical remarks.

You are also welcome to follow our blog on Österreich forscht in German to be informed about news.