The Water Deer on a Road: Road-Kill Characteristics of a Nationally Abundant but Internationally Threatened Species

Despite numerous efforts on reducing road-kill worldwide, the collisions have been occurring continuously. Many factors are affecting road-kill occurrences and the effect is various by species. We investigated Hydropotes inermis argyropus road-kill characteristics on the national highway. We examined 9,099 H. i. argyropus road-kill points with distance to the gaps on road (interchange and intersection) and distance to six natural land-cover types as explanatory variables. We also examined the number of road-kill occurrences according to temporal variation using chi-square test with 9,658 events. In general, H. i. argyropus road-kill location tended to occur close to the gaps on road, agricultural lands and forests. The average distance from road-kill to the gap was 694.7 m and 78.6% of the collisions were occurred within 1 km from the gaps. In addition, Kruskal-Wallis test showed the distance between road-kill points and each land cover and the gaps was significantly different. The temporal analyses showed that the differences of the H. i. argyropus road-kill frequency are significant in both month and season. Our results implies H. i. argyropus road-kill location tended to occur close to the gaps on road, agricultural lands and forests in general, especially during May and June, according to their seasonal behavior. Thus, we suggest there is a need of concentrated management on the roads with specific characteristics for both wildlife and human safety.