ArticlePloS one2016
Carcass Persistence and Detectability: Reducing the Uncertainty Surrounding Wildlife-Vehicle Collision Surveys.
Article in PloS one, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 93 citations in OpenAlex.
- Do more birds mean more bird-aircraft collisions? A meta-analysis testing a key wildlife management tenet.PloS one · 2026Pooled it
- Bella and Charlie Are Not the Problem-It's Us: The Real Causes of Wildlife Rescue in NSW.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Article
- Patterns of wildlife-vehicle collisions in Poland: a cross-taxonomic analysis of a nationwide citizen science dataset.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Detecting mass mortality events in wildlife populations.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2026Article
- Retrospective multicenter analysis of causes of death in wild mammals in Southern Germany (2019-2023).Frontiers in veterinary science · 2026Article
- Global Roadkill Data: a dataset on terrestrial vertebrate mortality caused by collision with vehicles.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Mammal Roadkills in Lithuanian Urban Areas: A 15-Year Study.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Amphibian and Reptile Road Mortality in Special Nature Reserve Obedska Bara, Serbia.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- How Is Wildlife Affected by the COVID-19 Pandemic? Lockdown Effect on the Road Mortality of Hedgehogs.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2021Article
- Spatio-Temporal Patterns and Consequences of Road Kills: A Review.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2021Review
- Article
- Temporal patterns of wildlife roadkill in the UK.PloS one · 2021Article
- Article
- Response of vertebrate scavengers to power line and road rights-of-way and its implications for bird fatality estimates.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Impacts and Potential Mitigation of Road Mortality for Hedgehogs in Europe.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2020Review
- Wildlife roadkill patterns in a fragmented landscape of the Western Amazon.Ecology and evolution · 2020Article
- The Australian Roadkill Reporting Project-Applying Integrated Professional Research and Citizen Science to Monitor and Mitigate Roadkill in Australia.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2020Article
- Article
- Daytime driving decreases amphibian roadkill.PeerJ · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 6 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Carcass persistence time and detectability are two main sources of uncertainty on roadkill surveys. In this study, we evaluate the influence of these uncertainties on roadkill surveys and estimates. To estimate carcass persistence time, three observers (including the driver) surveyed 114km by car on a monthly basis for two years, searching for wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVC). Each survey consisted of five consecutive days. To estimate carcass detectability, we randomly selected stretches of 500m to be also surveyed on foot by two other observers (total 292 walked stretches, 146 km walked). We expected that body size of the carcass, road type, presence of scavengers and weather conditions to be the main drivers influencing the carcass persistence times, but their relative importance was unknown. We also expected detectability to be highly dependent on body size. Overall, we recorded low median persistence times (one day) and low detectability (<10%) for all vertebrates. The results indicate that body size and landscape cover (as a surrogate of scavengers' presence) are the major drivers of carcass persistence. Detectability was lower for animals with body mass less than 100g when compared to carcass with higher body mass. We estimated that our recorded mortality rates underestimated actual values of mortality by 2-10 fold. Although persistence times were similar to previous studies, the detectability rates here described are very different from previous studies. The results suggest that detectability is the main source of bias across WVC studies. Therefore, more than persistence times, studies should carefully account for differing detectability when comparing WVC studies.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.