Analyses of road-Kills data harvested voluntarily : The case of the eurasian Badger (Meles Meles), the european Polecat (Mustela Putorius) and the Raccoon (Procyon Lotor) in wallonia

Abstract

Road infrastructures impact wildlife species in several ways. In particular, animals could suffer from habitat loss, traffic mortality, barrier to movements and populations subdivision. Despite the importance of those issues and the large amount of available data, only few published papers investigated road-wildlife interactions in Wallonia, Belgium so far. Road-kills observations recorded between 2006 and 2016 in three different databases have therefore been analysed, focusing on the Eurasian badger (Meles meles), the European polecat (Mustela putorius) and the raccoon (Procyon lotor). Those data have been harvested voluntarily, without any sampling program. In this master thesis, an original methodology has first been designed to sort out and select relevant data. To do so, distances to roads have been used and double-counts have been removed. Then, the goal was to test whether roadkill observations could serve as an indicator of wildlife populations’ status and trends. Results showed poor to medium similarity between collision data and data that were considered as the reference. Finally, impacts of roads on these mammals have been investigated. Hotspots maps have been drawn, and it has been calculated that at least 7,42% to 13,69% of badgers’ populations are killed on roads each year. However, all those results are only partially reliable as they depend on search effort, which was unknown. For further research, it is recommended to improve data encoding and to investigate deeper the issue of sampling effort.