Literature review and hotspot analysis

A critical review of the wildlife-vehicle collision literature, paired with your own hotspot analysis of a dataset from weeks 1 through 6.

Due: 12 April 2027 · Weight: 40%

Weeks 1 through 6 gave you the ecology of macropod road behaviour, the strike dataset, spatial and temporal clustering, impact mechanics, and human perception at dusk. This assignment asks you to turn that into two connected pieces of research work: a critical review of the published literature on wildlife-vehicle collisions, and your own hotspot analysis of the regional dataset used across those sessions.

The brief#

Review the literature on wildlife-vehicle collision hotspots critically enough to identify where it disagrees with itself, then produce your own hotspot analysis of the provided dataset and say where it agrees or disagrees with what you found.

A strong review doesn’t just report what the literature says — it notices when two well-cited sources define “hotspot” differently, or when a strong result doesn’t survive an exposure adjustment, and says so. A strong hotspot analysis states its method plainly enough that a reader could reproduce it, and is honest about where the underlying reporting bias (week 3) limits what it can claim.

What you submit#

A single document combining the literature review and your hotspot analysis, with the analysis itself (code, notebook, or spreadsheet, your choice of tool) attached so the method is checkable. State your sources in full and declare any assistance used in producing either half.

The marking: block above renders as a weighted criterion table: critical synthesis of the literature and rigour of the hotspot analysis are each worth half the mark.