As the owner of a tiny car, I drive with white knuckles in October and November. It's not other motorists I'm afraid of, but deer. On average, 2 million deer-vehicle collisions occur yearly, costing more than $4 billion in vehicle damage. About 5% of those collisions involve human injury, and sometimes deaths.

Average monthly animal strike claim frequencies per 1000 drivers, January 2006 to December 2011. Highway Loss Data Institute

Claims per 1000 drivers from 2006-2011. Note the regular peak each year in November. Highway Loss Data Institute

Most of those collisions happen in November because deer are on the move, looking for a hook-up. As days get shorter, male testosterone production increases. Fall is rut season, and male deer roam widely in search of females.

If you're driving at dusk or dawn in November, you're on a Highway to the Danger Zone: the majority of deer collisions happen this month. The average cost of a deer-vehicle collision is $8,388, and $30,773 for a moose-vehicle collision.

States have a variety of different ways to dealing with the driving hazard of carcasses on the road. Dead bodies on and near a road can attract scavengers, causing more animal-vehicle collisions.

Records of wildlife-vehicle collisions could provide data to help to protect both drivers and wildlife. Unfortunately, that data is usually collected on paper forms by many different individuals. It's tough to assemble a usable dataset. This gave Utah wildlife researcher Daniel Olson an idea – what if that data could be collected via smartphone?

Olson et al. 2014. Monitoring Wildlife-Vehicle Collisions in the Information Age: How Smartphones Can Improve Data Collection. PLoS ONE 9(6): e98613. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0098613

Dead Things: There's an App for That

In Utah, there are enough dead animals that the Department of Transportation pays contractors to monitor roads. They go out Monday and Thursday, drive the roads they're assigned to, and pick up any dead things they see on the road.

Olson explained this is not an easy job: "It's really hard work. Some seasons of the year there's so many dead animals, they'd fill a pickup truck up, so they pull a trailer. A lot of the deer carcasses can be moved by one person by dragging, but if it's a moose or domestic cow, it's really challenging. They have winches to get them on the trailer. " The average weight of an adult male White-tail deer is 150 lbs; an adult male moose can weight up to 1000 lbs (450 kg).*

Each contractor covers around 1700 miles of road, and keeps track of what they're picking up and where with old-school clipboards and paper. They estimate the location of each kill using road mile markers.

Screenshot of a live map generated by the Utah Wildlife Vehicle Collision Reporter. Utah DOT

In a project involving wildlife biologists, GPS and Geographic specialists, and app programmers, Olson created an app for dead things. This allowed the contractors to precisely locate each kill via GPS coordinates, quickly enter data about the animal, and move on. The app automatically transmitted that data back electronically, eliminating the manual step of entering in the data.

Using the researchers' smartphone app saved 48 to 56 hours of data-entry time, and an additional 100 hours of labor transcribing the paper records into a database. Data accuracy was improved by up to 19%. The new system's rapid generation of live maps helped the Department of Transportation rapidly respond to areas of concern. Data collected on paper forms could take months or years before information was transcribed, and action could be taken.

The researchers' app code was released as open source, but is designed for use by state workers. One app is available right now for us regular folks: AvoiDeer. Initially developed in Norway, it's now for sale in the US as well. AvoiDeer crowdsources reports of elk, moose, and deer, and alerts you when you are driving toward an area where many animals have been sighted on the road.

I installed it on my phone to give it a test drive, but the user base is still quite small in the United States. Some tweaks seem to be needed in the app itself – the "local sighting" I was warned about was actually near Galway, Ireland. To be fair, it did clearly indicate that the deer was 6,441 km away from my current location, but still, not my idea of "local." An ideal system would be something with a user base of Waze, although that app actually discourages people fromreporting large animals on the road that aren't already dead.

Several states have web-based systems that allow drivers to report animal strikes; California's Roadkill Observation System is the largest. Crowdsourcing the location of dead things by drivers also creates a new risk: entering data on a smartphone while one drives.

Bring Out Your Dead

While I've focused on the cost to drivers, roadkill is fundamentally an issue of wildlife conservation. Better information about where road kills occur, and what's dead, can help plan future construction to try to route animals over, under, or away from busy highways. We can't fence all the roads in the US, because that would inhibit the natural migration and movement of wildlife. Fencing is hugely expensive: the cost of standard wildlife fencing can cost up to $528,000/mile. Deer jump, so a fence needs to be at least 8 feet (2.4M) tall, and strong enough that deer don't get hung up on it and disembowel themselves.

Data about roadkill can help indicate areas where wildlife corridors or interventions can best be placed, and they do work. A wildlife corridor built under the Trans-Canada highway cut roadkills of elk, moose, and deer by 96%. Moose, wolves, cougars, and bears also use the corridor to safely cross the road. But that's only the large animals; smaller animals like snakes, turtles, frogs, and amphibians are generally not counted. [Their toll is high.](http://rzsnsw.metapress.com/content/ll67746001p74622/ ""an ecological disaster"")

There is also the quite disturbing finding that many drivers deliberately target smaller animals and run them over on purpose. Current data is needed on the littlest road crossers; some research suggests that areas designated as "hot spots" based on road kills are no longer areas where large populations exist. Because we ran over them all.

So, drive safely this November. Share the road with something fury, scaly, or feathery. You might make use of this great information on how to avoid hitting a deer from University of Illinois Extension Service.

*Edited 10-4-2014 to correct average weight typo for male White Tail Deer.