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discussion / Data management and processing tools  / 28 October 2022

Using Average speed trapping to mitigate Wildlife Vehicle Collisions

Gregory Rasmussen

Gregory Rasmussen

Founder CEO Painted Dog Research trust. Committed to using science to drive conservation decisions, development of students and commu

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Help needed to manage average speed trapping data with a view to  mitigating Wildlife Vehicle Collisions

With a view to mitigating WildlifeVehicle collisions are working on collecting speed data using Average speed trapping over set distances. We are collecting these data manually that for now is fine,  but is there a group member that could point us to )help us with ;-)) a DB system from either two tablets or PC's that will automatically connect the same number plate immediately  it is detected for the second time so with a given distance the speed spits out .



Akiba
@Freaklabs
Freaklabs
I'm an engineer and product designer working on wildlife conservation technology.

28 October 2022 2:59pm

Hi Gregory. 
I don't know if it's ethical to record license plate pictures for speed detection. It also sounds like it's a bit of a difficult approach to speed detection. Have you considered using a doppler radar based speed detector? You would likely need to DIY it or collaborate with someone that could assist with designing one but I think you'd get more reliable data in an automated way. 

Just my $0.02.

Akiba

Rob Appleby
@Rob_Appleby  | He/him
Wild Spy

5 November 2022 5:25am

Hi Gregory, I agree with Akiba - it can be tricky to get ethics approvals for this sort of thing. I've been working on a wildlife warning road signage project for a few years and the project uses radar-enabled signs to take a speed before and after the sign. Problem is, the signs are expensive. However, we are interested in adding some 'control' or nil-treatment roads to the mix, so we'd be interested in finding a radar speed logging system that we could deploy to mimic the sign radars, along the lines of what @Freaklabs mentioned. A variation on this project perhaps? 

Could be worth investigating? This model seems to have reasonable range: 

The other thing that comes to mind is the so-called licence plate camera from Reconyx:

https://www.reconyx.com/product/hyperfire-2-license-plate-capture-camera

They are limited to vehicles travelling 80km/hr or slower and I think they only take stills, but you possibly use them in multiple places to record plate data. 

How are you measuring speed with cameras by the way? Be very interested to hear more and keen to collaborate on a low(ish) cost radar solution if that's of interest.

Cheers,

Rob