Mitigating the human-wildlife conflict on roads: Czech perspective

Czechia has a dense transportation network.The vast majority of roads are unfenced, which even applies to certain sections of motorways.Along with high populations of wildlife, particularly roe deer and wild boar, this creates a potential for conflicts on transportation infrastructure.Between 2010 and 2019, the number of recorded events in the form of traffic accidents -collisions with wildlife-tripled.Currently, wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVCs) make up 50% of all traffic accidents occurring outside builtup areas.This places a significant administrative burden on traffic police, and as a result, reporting of these events is gradually being discontinued in various districts in the official traffic accident database.Thus, the official data after 2019 shows a decline.On the other hand, data from hunters is unreliable, as hunters are not motivated to report roadkill.Therefore, at CDV, we created a model that aims to estimate the true number of these incidents.From our estimates, it appears that the official WVC numbers reported by the police today represent about half of the actual situation.