Funding Source

USDOT

Total Project Cost

$124,000

Agency ID or Contract Number

69A3551747109

Start and End Dates

1/1/2018 to 12/31/2018

Brief Description of
Research Project

States increasingly maintain databases of wildlife-vehicle conflict (WVC), including locations of carcasses and crashes involving animals. Once these data are collected, a common and expensive barrier before they can be used in safety and environmental planning is identification of ?hotspots? of incidents (here defined as locations of high-rates and/or statistically-significant clusters). We have pioneered app and web-based reporting and visualization systems for carcass and crash data for California. We propose to develop a web-based analytical environment that state DOTs can use to automate certain analyses of WVC hotspots in order to inform planning to improve driver and wildlife safety. The system will be available to DOTs in one of 3 forms: 1) used on Road Ecology Center (REC) servers with administrative password-protection for the DOT, 2) used on REC servers with public facing features and usability, and 3) exportable to local/DOT servers to set up and run. The system will either ingest data in spreadsheet form, prepared by the user, or operate based on automated ingestion of data from web-based sources. We will work with CA, CO, MN, NJ, NV, and TX, DOTs and their wildlife agency partners to ensure that the features are generally useable for DOTs.