Dane County Deer/Vehicle Collision GIS Project
Dane County Deer/Vehicle Collision Assessment
CONTACT PERSONS
Bonner Karger (bskarger@wisc.edu)
Aaron Krebs (lmkack@cs.com)
Paul Weum (weeums@mailbag.com)
Brandon Wotachek (bjwotaski@hotmail.com)
OBJECTIVE
Correlating locations of deer habitat and feeding grounds with location and
frequency of deer/vehicle collisions.
DESCRIPTION
Background
Annually, there are over one thousand deer/vehicle collisions in Dane County
alone. Studying the connections between collisions and their geographic locations
is important because these incidents can have a great impact on humans and deer,
not to mention insurance rate hikes. If correlations between collisions and
certain geographic locations can be made, future work may be done to minimize
vehicle-to-deer contact through containment and/or route changing techniques.
This issue is important because deer habitat areas are becoming less abundant
as our urban areas continue to swell. As habitat areas become built
environments, the deer must go elsewhere to continue to prosper. Also,
and more importantly, as agricultural crop types change from time to time,
deer habitat areas could shift in response to the change in available food
types. As deer reproduction rates remain larger than death rates from
hunting and even CWD, this problem may become more severe in the future.
While deer populations increase, the average annual daily traffic and human
population are also increasing.
Study Area
The study area is composed of 6 townships in Dane County. They are: Bristol,
Burke, Sun Prairie, Vienna, Westport, and Windsor. Within these townships,
we will be studying areas of habitat (as defined by the DNR), deer/vehicle
collisions, and agricultural areas where deer are likely to be found feeding.
We chose this study area because of the diverse combination of expanding towns
and villages, and because there is an abundance of both habitat and agriculture
in this area. In addition, there are several classes of roads (interstate,
state, county, tertiary) in this study area, giving us a better representative
sample with which to make our assessment.
Proposed Tasks
First, we will plot the deer/vehicle collisions on a base map of the six townships
in the study area. Then, we will combine data layers containing deer habitat and
agricultural areas that are prime grounds for deer feeding. We will then compare
the DVC frequency in areas containing deer habitat that intersect roads, deer habitat
and feeding areas which intersect roads together. To validate our findings we will
compare, DVC frequency on roads that are not intersected by either deer habitat alone
or deer habitat and feeding areas together, with the above results.