Richard Collins: Roadkill monitoring identifies wildlife most often killed on roads

In Flanders, almost 90,000 records of roadkill were logged by over 4,000 citizen-scientists between 2008 and 2020

Foxes are among the mammals most frequently killed on European roads

We have 2.2 million registered road vehicles in Ireland. There are 1.4 billion worldwide and numbers are increasing relentlessly. Transport takes a huge toll on wildlife everywhere, but determining the number of victims is notoriously difficult. ‘Dieren onder do weilen’, ‘Animals under wheels’, is a Belgian citizen-science roadkill monitoring project.

Flanders, with 478 inhabitants per km2, is one of Europe’s most densely populated areas. It has over 5km of road per km2, an extremely concentrated network. Some 70 million kilometres were driven on Flemish motorways in 2019, the year prior to the COVID -19 pandemic.