Roads have multiple effects on wildlife, from animal mortality, habitat and population fragmentation, to modification of animal reproductive behaviour. Amphibians in particular, due to their activity patterns, population structure, and preferred habitats, are strongly affected by traffic intensity and road density. On the other hand, road-kills studies and conservation measures have been extensively applied on highways, although amphibians die massively on country roads, where conservation measures are not applied. Portugal has not any national program for monitoring road-kills, a common practice in other European countries (e.g. UK; The Netherlands). This is necessary to identify hotspots of road-kills in order to implement conservation measures correctly. However, monitoring road-kills is expensive and time consuming, and depend mainly on volunteers. Therefore, cheap, easy to implement, and automatic methods for detecting road-kills over larger areas (broad monitoring) and along time (continuous monitoring) are necessary. This project aimed at developing a mobile system that can scan and search for amphibians on the road surface thus creating an automatic map of casualties. A fixed tracker (also developed on the project) is then placed on the locations where a peak of casualties is found in order to capture images of the species while they are still alive and crossing the roads.
This project was sponsored by the FCT program under the reference PTDC/BIA-BIC/4296/2012.