North Dakota roadkill study aims to shed light on hotspots for wildlife-vehicle collisions (2024)

GRAND FORKS — Motorists in North Dakota might wonder what’s going on if they’re driving down the highway and encounter a dead animal carcass painted pink along the road. But rest assured, there’s not some kind of sad*stic carcass artist out there making the rounds, partners in a statewide research project say.

As part of the study, a partnership between UND, the North Dakota Department of Transportation and the North Dakota Game and Fish Department, UND graduate student Lawson Frey and his technician, undergrad Lydia Wilson, are traveling the state looking for road-killed wildlife and marking the animals with pink livestock paint.

Using an ArcGIS app called Survey123, the researchers enter data about the road-killed animals they encounter, Frey says, including GPS coordinates where the kills occur and the species involved. The carcasses — animals of all sizes — are painted to avoid sampling them twice.

The goal is to learn more about the frequency of vehicle-animal collisions, identify potential trouble spots, and mitigate their occurrence, said Susan Felege, UND professor of wildlife ecology and management.

DOT is funding the study, she said.

“A lot of studies and states will work with their DOTs to do these kinds of carcass collections, but when they do it, they also pick the carcasses up” to avoid double-counting, Felege said. “That’s why we’re spray-painting … and not picking up roadkill all over the state.”

Felege and Melissa Schmitt, a UND assistant professor of biology specializing in large mammal ecology, are faculty leads on the project.

According to Felege, 5% of all vehicle crashes nationally involve wildlife, while the frequency in North Dakota is more than 18% — one of the highest in the nation.

At the same time, a significant amount of data gets missed because of North Dakota’s reporting requirements. Motorists only have to report accidents that involve human injury or result in property or vehicle damage of more than $4,000, she says.

Contributed / Susan Felege

“Many accidents with deer in particular, but also other things, go unnoticed and undocumented because they don’t meet the standards for reporting,” Felege said. “One of the things that we wanted to look at is how many accidents were missed from the carcass data.”

By expanding that database, project partners can hopefully better understand situations where mitigation, such as wildlife crossings, can be most effective, she said.

Discussions between UND and NDDOT date back nearly two years, Felege says.

“We don’t get that much data from crash (reports) to provide insights about where wildlife crossings should be, where hotspots are, things like that,” she said. “We’ve been doing some hotspot analysis from the crash data, but it’s limited.”

As a large mammal ecologist, UND’s Schmitt says learning about why animals on the landscape behave the way they do can also shed light on why wildlife-vehicle collisions occur.

Contributed / UND

“I think a lot about what drives decision-making in large animals, so this was right up my alley,” Schmitt said of the research project. “Part of that is thinking about where animals are on the landscape and what they’re doing, which helps us think about why they’re being hit and kind of the run-up that leads to them being hit.

“And so that transitions into a really nice platform into the next phase — thinking about some of the ways we can mitigate some of these hotspots that we’re finding, thinking about ways either with crossings or fencing, but harnessing their behavior to actually put in practice conservation action.”

In developing the study, research partners divided the state into two main routes, Frey says: One from Grand Forks to Minot and areas near Kenmare, Killdeer and the Killdeer Mountains; then from Interstate 29 south of Grand Forks and west along I-94 to Jamestown, and areas near Carrington and Bowman, the latter in far southwestern North Dakota.

“Basically, it just involves driving 50 to 60 miles an hour and then as soon as there’s a carcass, we pull over, stop, and fill out our survey,” Frey said. “Then we’ll just mark it with some paint.”

One day in late May, Frey says he put on about 700 miles.

With Wilson, his technician, now trained in, they can survey separate routes, Frey says. In addition, personnel from the Game and Fish Department’s wildlife veterinary lab are monitoring a stretch of highway from Bismarck to Underwood, and Wyatt Mack from DOT is surveying a stretch along I-94 coming out of Bismarck, Felege says.

“That way, there’s different places we can focus our efforts on farther out from Bismarck and cover some ground, and then share information,” she said. “They also get an idea of what our process is like, so we can help each other.”

There’s also the potential for helping Game and Fish monitor for chronic wasting disease if the crew comes across fresh roadkill deer in CWD surveillance areas, one of which is northeast North Dakota, said Dr. Charlie Bahnson, the department’s wildlife veterinarian in Bismarck.

“We’ve been trying to fold in roadkill as part of our surveillance effort for quite a few years, but really, it’s kind of an inefficient way to do it,” he said. “Our (wildlife) techs will drive a lot of miles for not really consistent sampling.

“There’s a lot of value in this project, and knowing the predictive aspect of where and when to look could be really helpful in making our surveillance effort more efficient.”

Public safety — and knowing where threats to wildlife exist — is also a consideration, Bahnson says.

In addition to marking roadkill sites, Frey is documenting live animals and where they seem to be most abundant. It’s too early in the study to draw any conclusions from the data they’ve gathered to date, he says, but areas near water have produced the highest number of ducks and small mammals, and roadkill pheasants have been common farther west.

The survey will continue through July and resume October through December, with similar data collection planned for the same time frames next year.

“I think it’s kind of this wonderful marriage between thinking about management and ecology and behavior and conservation all together,” Schmitt said. “Also the human dimensions piece — how do we think about conserving our wildlife while also preserving human life and human resources?

“It’s a very cool study that I think is going to have a huge impact in the state.”