Roadkill Literally ‘Drives’ Some Species to Extinction
On May 8, 2021, at the crack of dawn, shreds of mist crept from the chilly fields onto Ziendeweg, a country road south of Amsterdam. The rush hour traffic caused by commuters using the road to bypass jams on the highway had not yet picked up. But another activity was taking place. All along the four-kilometer-long road, small groups of people were carrying bundles of white crosses and quietly beginning to erect them on the roadside.
An early effort along these lines was started in 1992 by Brewster Bartlett, aka “Dr. Splatt,” then a science teacher at Pinkerton Academy, a high school in New Hampshire. He used the school’s very first e-mail server to exchange students’ sightings and post them to a bulletin board. Since then technology has improved, and roadkill monitoring is now conducted through the use of dedicated apps or online citizen science platforms.
Astronomical as those numbers for larger animals may be, they pale in comparison with the amounts of insects and other smaller creatures that perish on the road. To get a handle on that, Arnold van Vliet of Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands and his colleagues devised a citizen science project specifically focused on insect mortality.
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