What is ‘Wildlife on Roads’ ?

Wildlife on Roads began with a handbook that was authored by Kari Gunson and Fred Schueler in 2020. The handbook is meant to provide individuals with the tools to accurately document vertebrates on Ontario’s roads (turtles, snakes, birds, mammals, and amphibians). With the handbook we created an iNaturalist project (iNat). We schedule many workshops to provide an overview of the book and to teach and train individuals to collect data. We have since defined a road Worrior as a citizen scientist that is able to collect accurate and standardized data about a wildlife crossing a road.

The two most important pieces of information are identification to species and an accurate location. When an animal is road-killed, often identification to species is difficult so we provide tips for taking photos of key characteristics so the animal may be possibly be identified at a later time.

An accurate location is greatly facilitated by using satellites that occur in our skies. Our smart phones are able to use these satellites to obtain a location of an observation. Did you know you don’t even need cellular phone data to do this! The only trick is that you need to turn on your phone to measure location with your photos. Once you do this your phone is able to map your photos.

When there is enough data for a specific location, we can influence subsequent mitigation. Rouge Urban National Park has recently installed a ‘large’ easily seen Painted Turtle sign on Finch Avenue at the Amos Ponds.

Once a road Worrior is able to master taking accurate photos with the location, we can use these photos in our iNaturalist repository or you can email them to us by emailing at (sorry, you need Javascript to see this e-mail address)

Find out more information on our newly released video and please subscribe to our growing network for updates on workshops and our evolving program.

Kari Gunson
Kari Gunson

Kari Gunson, a practitioner in road ecology since 1999, initiated the 'Wildlife on Roads' program recently in response to a need to inspire and harness grassroots efforts for implementation of mitigation solutions.

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