[Reproduced from www.oeco.org.br]

The researcher who wants to save animals

Photos: Alex Bager/Every year more than 400 millions of animals are killed on Brazil's highways.

To arrive at the estimate of 450 million animals killed annually in Brazil, Alex Bager (teacher and researcher at Lavras University, state of Minas Gerais) was based on published scientific articles with data from different Brazilian biomes. On the basis of the rates reported in articles an average rate was esrablished for the Brazilian territory and extrapolated for the entire network of 1.7 million kilometers.

It was created by several universities in Brazil, the REB - Road Ecology Brazil. Annual meeting has been held since 2010. Next one will be in the city of Lavras in 27-29 January 2014.

"Urubu" is the name of our most popular vulture (the black one).

The app. The idea is simple and at the same time fantastic! Anyone who has a smartphone or tablet can download the Urubu Mobile and collaborate with the collection of data on roadkill. When someone finds a dead animal on the roadside, the person opens the application, photographs it and the image is automatically georeferenced and, when a wireless network signal is found, the photo is sent to the Urubu Mobile system. Once in the system, a specialized team identifies the picture and gets the record of the species. When the data is stored in the system, with the exact location, this prevents that repeated pics be computed as individuals differ and so would overestimate their data.

"The idea is that any person may download the application and use it: truck drivers, taxi drivers, bus drivers, people who often travel on the roads of the country in general. In a world increasingly connected in social networks, is being established the largest collaborative network of monitoring of fauna that Brazil already witnessed", says Alex Bager.
"We know very little about the road kill of fauna in the country, so whatever comes is profit. If we increase the volume of data in 10% now, we'll take a huge leap", says Alex. With the improvement of the data will be easier to propose measures that reduce the stratospheric number of roadkill annually in Brazil.