Wildlife road-crossing monitoring system: Advances and test-site validation

The design and validation of a wireless monitoring system for dealing with wildlife road crossing problems is addressed. The wildlife detection procedure is based on the Doppler radar technology integrated in wireless sensor network devices. Such a solution tries to overcome the so-called habit effect arising with standard alert road-systems (e.g., static or flashing road signs) introducing the principle of real-time and event-based driver notification. To this end, the radar signal is locally processed by the wireless node to infer the target presence close to roadsides. In case of radar detection, the wireless node promptly transmits the collected information to the control unit, for data storage and further statistics. A prototype of the system has been deployed in a real test-site in Alps region for performance assessment. A selected set of preliminary results are here presented and discussed to show the capabilities of the proposed solution.