Citizen science and other records
Our main source of data was our citizen science project: Red Ecuatoriana para el Monitoreo de Fauna Atropellada (hereafter REMFA). This project started in September 2020 and is ongoing, for this study we capture records reported in the first 24 months (September 2020-2022). REMFA is an initiative that in addition to capture roadkill data seeks to promote environmental education on road ecology to citizens. Using word of mouth, traditional and social media we invited people to share photos and geographic location of roadkill events in Ecuador. Communications included emails, social networks (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter), messaging platforms (Whatsapp), and the mobile App Epicollect5 (dedicated project “Animales atropellados Ecuador”). We also compiled roadkill records from iNaturalist (https://www.inaturalist.org/), an open global online system where naturalists and citizen scientists share observations of biodiversity. Additionally, we included sporadic roadkill records found in the scientific literature but that had not been gathered via systematic surveys.
All records were checked (confirming species identification when photographs were available and location when GPS data were provided) and combined into a standardized electronic database. Without standardized methodologies and no information on monitoring effort, estimating roadkill rates, as done for systematic studies, was not possible. Instead, we summarize these data by reporting total number of records for identified taxonomic classes and species (when identified), and total for each Ecuadorian province.
For systematic and non-systematic data, when geographical coordinates of roadkill events were not available, we defined coordinates as the central point of the geographical reference provided by citizens or the published source. For these cases, we included an uncertainty value to reflect the potential error in the estimated coordinates based on the described area or road. This was given in km when we had information on the location of the road where the roadkill was found, or in km2 when the road was not described but had information on the administrative area.