I’d like to do a search for all observations of roadkill turtles and snakes on Long Island (Kings, Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk Counties, NY). I don’t see how to search for roadkills, am i missing something obvious?
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There are projects for recording roadkill in most states. (Sorry, I don’t know the one(s) in your area.) There’s also the project Global Roadkill Observations. Odds are most roadkill in your area is in one or the other of those projects. I think maybe you can search for projects that have “roadkill” in their names. There are also the projects Dead Birds, Dead Mammals, and so on through the vertebrates. One option for cause of death in those is “vehicle.”
If the observation isn’t in a relevant project, I don’t think there’s a simple way to find it.
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There is not a roadkill category as far as I am aware. You can search for dead organisms, but not all observations are annotated as alive or dead, so you would be missing the uncategorized observations.
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That was a busy one minute on this thread, wasn’t it! Good point about the “dead” annotation.
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There is a Roadkill observation field that a lot of people use, and many of the roadkill projects use, but I looked and it appears that most of the iNat users on Long Island must be using another observation field. (Different observation fields have been set up by different people for different projects, around the world, which, unfortunately, has led to a fair amount of duplication of similarly named fields that all do the same thing.)
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I looked in the “GLOBAL Roadkill Observations” project and that has more reptiles from Long Island:
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thanks Jon! i’m new to this obviously so i hadn’t tried these searches yet. I am also intrigued by the “alive” or “dead” annotation, i suspect that most dead things people find are actually roadkill.
Russ
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Not necessarily. The second dead opossum I found was roadkill, but the first was two bones in a power line easement, and I’ve observed critters killed by spiders and a dead bird near a street, but not where roadkill would be.
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=Global Roadkill Observations is a good place to start!
The opposite is true, I’d say. Most dead stuff just died on it’s own, of unknown cause or got killed by another animal or parasite of any kind. Spider webs and conservatories/ sunroom are also lovely sources…
This one is a bit of a shame it’s not so easy to filter. I currently work in road ecology and have dug through some inat data. One project I’m working on is in regards safe road crossings for timber rattlesnakes in the southern Appalachians (I’d like to see if I can identify any “hotspots” for road mortality). The biggest challenge is that coordinates are automatically obscured in my area because timber rattlers are state threatened.
But I have tried doing some searches, anyway, to get a handle on the sort of value building a project and working to make sure that people allow us to download precise coordinates (and advocating my organization to include that work in my regular duties). I’ve checked a number of the observation fields available and they’re pretty poorly applied for road mortality of timber rattlesnakes.
I suspect this is largely the case because people who are making these observations rarely observe multiple individuals. They’re just noting something that they’ve happened across. I’ve had the best results doing a simple search for the “dead” annotation. Obviously not everything in the results is road mortality, but it’s easy enough to rule out observations that are obviously not road mortality. In looking at these observations, I also don’t see any consistent project use for them. I did find a couple projects through these observations, but if I really wanted to do an inat data pull justice, it looks like I’d be best served to do a regional road mortality project for all species and just filter those results based on other criteria when I need to use it. Which means I’d probably need to decide to use one of the existing observation fields in my area and manually start going through “dead” observations within the region and adding that field.
It sure would be handy if the “dead” annotation could be expanded upon. Say, when you choose the “dead” annotation, a second dropdown appears with a “cause” and a handful of general options, which could be expanded upon further with observation fields. It wouldn’t require more casual inat users to know exactly which observation fields to use. IME, annotations tend to be used a bit more often.