Can Vehicular Trauma of Wildlife Tell us Something About Our Driving Risk? Taking a One Health Approach to Protect Humans and Wildlife
_{One Health: Trends and Opportunities}

Wildlife are routinely presented to the LSU Wildlife Hospital of Louisiana (WHL) following vehicular trauma. These injuries can be catastrophic, often requiring extensive medical or surgical care, or leading to death. Likewise, vehicular injuries in humans can be devastating, with more than 38,600 deaths and an estimated 4.4 million serious injuries associated with car accidents in 2020 alone. Because the interface between wildlife and humans is shrinking due to urban expansion, there has been a rise in the number of vehicles on the road and driving hours needed to cover the increased distances humans travel for work, school, and pleasure. Whether current traffic policies account for these increased vehicles and driving hours is not well known. Taking a One Health approach, would it possible to identify areas where vehicular injuries commonly occur in humans and wildlife to determine if patterns exist that could be addressed by developing policies to reduce these injuries? The purpose of this study is to determine if Department of Transportation data on vehicular accidents in the Baton Rouge metropolitan area are correlated to wildlife injuries sustained through vehicular trauma. Data collected from the DOT and WHL from 2011-2021 will be used for the study. Locations of the car accidents and sites where the wildlife were found will be mapped and analyzed using cluster and correlation analyses. The primary hypothesis of this study is that there will be an increased correlation between car accidents and locations of vehicular injuries sustained by wildlife due to current traffic policies in those areas. These results may be used to alter traffic policies to reduce injuries to humans and protect wildlife.