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^M00:00:12 >> We're out here in eastern Turkey at one of my research sites. We're between Kars and Lake Kuyucuk, our RAMSAR site. We're doing -- we're interested in doing a road kill survey. If you're interested in participating, you can use our new app -- our Splatter Spotter app which is free. And you can just fire that sucker up. You can hit "About us" to learn about the project and learn about how to collect data or you can just go directly to "Collect Data." Now note I'm not driving. My -- my able assistant is driving so I'm not doing anything unsafe. Most important thing. It's daylight hours. I -- I don't want you guys collecting data at night. It's much harder to see and it's much more easy to get distracted and all that kind of stuff so we only do road kill surveys in the daytime. Once you activate the app, you have three options. You can hit "Current Location" which essentially is going to GPS mark your -- wherever you are at the -- at the moment that you push the screen. "From the map" is an option that you can take after you get home and you know where the -- you recall at a particular intersection you saw a dead animal. You can use a map interface to drop a pin. We're just going to mark that location.

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>> Or you can use the "Transect" option. And I hope that you mostly use the transect option. That's the most useful to us. That will provide the most helpful data.

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>> So I'm going to show you that. You hit "Transect" and you just hit the "Start tracking" and go about whatever you're doing. Keep your eyes on the road and all your safe stuff and pass tractors safely like that and everything. So we just go. If we don't see anything, we -- when we get to our destination or when we're tired of this, we just hit the stop button right here in the upper, right corner. Otherwise, we just go until we see a kill and we just hit "Record a kill."

^M00:02:28 [ Pause ] ^M00:02:36

>> That's going to take us into a toggle menu. Now because we're driving and we're not necessarily going to stop every time or it might not be safe to stop or the individual might just be smooshed -- heavily smooshed, unknown is a very common category for us. So we break it down, though, into unknown small, unknown medium, and unknown large. You can also -- all the organisms are categorized that way. Every organism falls into either the small category, the medium category, or the large category based on size with small being squirrel size-ish. Medium being raccoon size-ish. And then things like coyotes, wolves, deer, those fall into the large size things. So you can select -- you can -- oops. Excuse me. Let me go back there. You can select medium, large, whatever, and it's gonna automatically toggle -- I've -- I've gone through and I've scored all of our species into one of those size classes. That's gonna shorten the list for you. You can either scroll if you want to find the species you're looking or you can just click right here on the -- the window and you can begin tagging. Say it's a wolf, w-o-l-f -- oh, nothing because I'm in the small. Wolf is large. If I hit large, then the wolf show up. And now I can just type that in. If it's in a safe place -- only if it's in an extremely safe place and -- and you have a desire to do so, you may take a photo. And you can take it directly from our app or you can have taken one previously and upload it from your iPhone library or it's perfectly simple to use no photo and just hit "no photo" and go on. Now this -- this whole toggle. That photo menu and this stuff here is the same no matter what you do; if you drop a pin, if you are doing a transect, et cetera. You can choose to leave all this blank. It's defaulted to be nothing, to have no value. If you don't understand what these mean, if you're not sure, don't worry about it. But if you do have a little bit more time and you can give us some more information, that is very helpful to us. "Segment" refers to how many, you know -- are you -- you're driving the whole road, are you driving as a few miles. Something like that. The "max speed" would be the fastest speed limit on the segment of the road where the individual was killed. "Lanes" represents how many lanes in total. In this case, our road has two lanes so I put two. The next question is "lane visibility." What that means is, on this path, could you see the entirety of the road. In this case, I can see the entirety of the road. There's a tractor on that side coming towards us; and now he's passing us; and so, yes, I can see the -- the visibility is -- is all. If there was some type of divider, a -- you know, line of trees, something of that -- something of that nature in the -- in the middle and I could only see my half of the lanes -- in my case that would be one lane, then I hit the "Half" button and that tells us that we're really only sensing half the road. Oh, look. There's some impatient Turkish drivers. Then the "surroundings" represent what is immediately to the side.

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So we have "undefined" which is a default which means I don't know or you don't know or you don't have time to care. "Urban" would be a city. "Suburb" then is same idea but less dense construction. So more like suburbia. "Cropland" would actually be this stuff off to our sides here. In this case, this is all dry farmed wheat so we'd say cropland. "Orchards" are also agricultural lands but these are treed agricultural lands. "Rangeland." This actually could be considered rangeland as well because when the -- when the -- in this particular case, when the wheat is done growing, they'll graze cattle and other animals in these fields. "Wildland" refers to any area. It could be a forested area. It could be a coastal site, shrub. It could be whatever you want to pick that is a natural landscape where people do not -- are not readily apparent. Wildland -- oh, excuse me. I just did that. "Riparian" is an area near a river, in or near a river. "Beach" is obviously the beach. And "mixed" refers to as the segment of the road that more than one of these categories in it. "Edge" refers to what's right exactly here on the side of the road. So we have a couple options. We have a "cliff" if there's a cliff that dropping off there or a cliff that's -- that's going right up to the side. "Wall" if it is a human created up and down structure. "Fence" is obviously a forensic. "Trees" are shrubs. "Ditch." This would not be -- this would not be considered a ditch. But a ditch would be actually a really rapid depression and elevation then rapid back up so an actual ditch. "Open" would be no barriers whatsoever. No ditch, no cliff, no nothing. And then "elevated." This would be considered an elevated roadway. This one we're on here. So we are about 3 meters or -- or 10 to 12 feet above the surrounding land and that matters. That also counts if you're on a bridge. Something of that nature. And then "wildlife signs" are just simply the presence or absence of wildlife signs. "Weather" is what the weather is now. If you smack this, you'll see the options are: Clear, overcast, foggy, high winds, rain, snow. These are all broad conditions that affect the amount of kill we get. So right now we are looking at obviously clear skies. "Temperature." If you know roughly what the temperature is, you can smack that. And if you've seen the kill before. And then we have a comment window where you're welcome to enter whatever you want in there; any additional data that can help us understand what's going on and you just hit -- you know, keep going essentially. And now, if we don't see anything else and we get home, we can just hit "stop." Or if we see another road kill, we can hit that. Now let's say we're done. And -- and once you stop the -- the transect, you have an option to "send all"; and that's gonna send all the data. And, in this case, it's gonna send it all. Now out here in Turkey, I -- I have my phone and all that kind of good stuff, but I do not have a Turkish cellular plan because all my assistants have Turkish cell phones. So, in this case, if I hit -- if I hit send, I'm not near a Wi-Fi signal, I'm not on a cell phone network, it'll send it to my mail app, and then it'll just be queued up until -- oh, look we almost have some road kill cow to show you, but apparently our wonderful driver is too -- is too smart to hit a -- to hit a -- hit a cow walking across the road. So, anyway, you say send and that's all good. Once your phone comes next into a Wi-Fi signal or gets back on the cellular network, it'll advance that -- that e-mail on towards us and that's great. So it's much appreciated. I hope you check out our Splatter Spotter app. It's in the iTunes store now. It's free and, please, check it out and give me your feedback if you think it's useful or how we can make it even better. Thanks for helping us understanding how fragmented landscapes are and how those -- that fragmentation affects animals across the planet. ^M00:11:13

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