Dataset

The data on roadkills is the heart of the project and was collected through the voluntary work of the participating citizen scientists. Therefore, it is a concern for us in the project team to give back to society as much as possible from the project. Moreover, as part of the listing on the platform Österreich forscht, we have committed ourselves to fulfilling the quality criteria for citizen science projects that apply there, which include, among other things, that results and data from a citizen science project must be made freely available.

As soon as a roadkill is reported, it is visible on our interactive map. You can filter by species on this map, create a so-called heatmap where you can see clustering points of reported animals and also create time series. This way you can get a first overview of which animals are reported where and when in the project. Each participant can download and use his/her own reports at any time.

Every second day, the data entered into the Roadkill project is validated by members of the project team to correct incorrect or inconsistent entries via the backend of the website or, if the record cannot be corrected, the record is deleted. Correction of data was done (i) by the project team itself if errors were obvious (e.g., animal in submitted image does not match species identification listed) or (ii) by the participants themselves after being advised by the project team that a correction was needed (e.g., roadkill is not on a road). Since the participants collected the data during their daily routine, the data presented are so-called presence data. 

To ensure the quality of the data, we used a stepwise selection process that allowed us to classify the submitted data into three quality levels at the end of this process: 

• Quality level 1: Data sets with correct animal identification (either by experts or by images) and consistent data.
• Quality level 2: Data sets with consistent data but no possible validation of the animal.
• Deleted: records with inconsistent data and no possible validation of the animal.

We thank all the citizen scientists who reported the data and helped identify the animals. Without the many volunteer efforts of the citizen scientists, this project would not be possible.

Please note that if you use the data and a publication from it, you must indicate where these data come from. Therefore, please cite accordingly.

Quality level 1 data

All quality level 1 data can be viewed and downloaded on GBIF: https://www.gbif.org/dataset/d0d5ef85-71b2-4da6-b6f6-c1c3d60987d3 

Please cite as: University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna. Roadkill. Occurrence dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/ejb47y accessed via GBIF.org on xxxx.

Quality level 2 data

All quality level 2 data can be viewed and downloaded on Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/communities/roadkill_dataset_quality_level_2/?page=1&size=20

Please cite as: Heigl, Florian, & Roadkill Community. (2022). Roadkill Dataset 2014-2020 Quality level 2 [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5878813

Personal data will of course not be made available.

Description of the data from 2014-2020: