Half a year ago, the Tasmanian Government introduced its Roadkill Reporter app – aiming to collect data, and map hotspots across the state.
Samantha Fox from the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment says so far, it’s seen around 2,600 reports, covering 53 species of animal.
“It covers everything from mammals, birds, reptiles, so snakes, blue tongue lizards, things like that,” explains Dr Fox.
“We get a lot of birds come through. I think we’ve even had some insects, which is a bit odd.”
Three of the state’s threatened species are in the top 12 reported: the Eastern quoll, the spotted quoll and the Tasmanian devil – which Dr Fox has a particular interest in, working on the Save the Devil Campaign.
Roadkill is the second biggest threat to our devil population after Devil Facial Tumour Disease.
“We lose a lot of devils on the roads every year, and on average we would lose between 350 to 450 devils every year to roadkill,” says Dr Fox.
“And that’s only the numbers that are actually reported to us. So the likelihood is that we lose a lot more than that.”
She’s hoping more people will start using the app, and that it will bring awareness to our deadly roads.
“We just ask people, if they have a chance to log roadkill reports, to get on and use it,” says Dr Fox.
“Because that’s the only way that we can then share this data with councils and road managers, so that they’re aware of any possible hotspots in their area, that they can then look at possible mitigation.”
“It’s impossible to really do anything about a problem unless you have the data. That really has to be the base starting point – collecting the data to then provide that to road managers so that they can make an informed choice about what they do about it.”
For more of this story, listen to this week’s episode of iHeart Tassie:
