Brazilian ecologists launch app to reduce roadkill
Brazilian ecologists launch app to reduce roadkill
By Antonio Pasolini
April 13, 2014
In Brazil alone, officials estimate that some 475 million animals die from being struck on the nation's roads. That's around 15 animals per second, totaling more than twice the country’s human population. The Centro Brasileiro de Estudos em Ecologia de Estradas (CBEE) is working to reduce those grim statistics with the help of an app called Urubu (vulture in Portuguese), which uses the power of crowd-sourcing to identify roadkill hotspots across the country.
Created in 2011, CBEE monitors roadkill and creates guidelines to improve the complicated relationship between highways and wildlife. To help it with its mission, CBEE designed Urubu to allow anyone with a smartphone and internet connection to photograph animals that have been hit by cars and send the images to be validated by a team of experts.
These experts will then classify the species of the roadkill (amphibian, reptilian, mammal, bird or indeterminate), and the data added to a database called BAFS, which will help the experts map out the highest risk areas and most affected species. The ultimate goal is to devise a plan for official environmental agencies to make adaptations to the country’s highways based on data collected in the field.
The project is led by CBEE director Alex Bager, who’s been researching road ecology since 1995 and also organizes the national congress of road ecology. Bager believes the number of animals being killed on the roads is much higher than current estimates and that the app may help produce a more accurate figure.
More:
http://www.gizmag.com/urubu-app-roadkill/31616/