Understanding vehicle-wildlife encounters: insights from animal movement datasets and road mortality surveys

Wildlife-vehicle collisions are an ongoing and widespread source of biodiversity loss. Understanding how, when and why these collisions happen is a key challenge in any conservation and management efforts. Data collection with biologgers can reveal information on how animals use their environment, interact with each other, and their adaptive responses to rapid environmental changes and anthropogenic features in the landscape —including their behavioral responses to linear infrastructures. The movement ecology field is rapidly shifting as we open new avenues of research, with increased access to modern tracking technologies, collecting high-volume high-resolution movement datasets for a growing number of animal species worldwide. Using these datasets to reveal road impacts on animal behavior is fundamental, since wildlife-vehicle collisions are the second-largest source of anthropogenic mortality for many vertebrate species. We will explore empirical examples with animal tracking data, as well as information collected through road surveys, and how these can serve as crucial tools to achieve a deeper understanding of animal movement and behavior towards roads and vehicles.