Common quail run over on a road in the province of Seville (Spain) // Photo: Jacinto Román

The COLECTA project ‘Pilot study for the collection of information on roadkill on state roads’ promoted by the Spanish Ministry of Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge and developed by the Doñana Biological Station - CSIC has aimed to launch a preliminary study for the implementation of the procedure for conservation teams to act in the presence of roadkill. The ultimate aim would be to establish a national mechanism for data collection by State road maintenance teams in the presence of roadkill, in application of service note 1/2023 of the Spanish Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility -MITMS-). 

The project was carried out in two phases. In the first phase, in close collaboration with the MITMS, a questionnaire was sent to the 156 road maintenance centres in Spain to find out about their particularities and how they act when removing dead animals from the roads. In a second phase, an information collection system was set up in four conservation centres where the viability of an information collection system developed by the Doñana Biological Station was verified, to be used by the conservation teams who received a small amount of training in the use of the system.

The project was carried out between September 2023 and September 2024 and offers very interesting results by highlighting a source of information on roadkill that has been very little used in Spain. It is also an abundant source of information, is well distributed in space and time and is collected in a similar way in all conservation centres. Its main disadvantage is that it only collects information on animals from the size of a hedgehog onwards. 

It is valid information for modelling population abundance of different species, including those relevant from the point of view of road safety, but also of other animals that were very frequently removed from the roads during the study period, such as cats and hares, whose population sizes are interesting to know for veterinary, biodiversity conservation and human health reasons, among others. 

During the development of the project, species belonging to the List of Wildlife Species under Special Protection Regime (LESRPE) were also collected, one of them with Vulnerable (VU) status. Despite constituting 4% of the animals collected, their importance is remarkable, as they are specimens whose casualties would not have been recorded, nor would the competent administration in matters of natural heritage have been aware of them had it not been for this project.

Considering the magnitude of the study (only 4 conservation centres out of 156 and a recording period of between 4 and 7 months), it is clear that the implementation of a recording and communication protocol such as the one developed in this project would allow a much greater volume of information on these species to emerge. These data would allow MITECO to assess the importance of this source of mortality for the different populations of species included in the LESRPE. 

The results suggest the advisability of developing a recording protocol such as the one tested in this pilot study in the rest of the state road network conservation centres.

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