Research proposal: a safety intervention
A capstone research proposal for a single wildlife-vehicle safety intervention, defensible on ecological, physical, human-factors and policy grounds at once.
Due: 28 May 2027 · Weight: 60%
The final project is where the semester’s five strands — macropod ecology, the strike dataset, impact and human-factors mechanics, engineering interventions, and the law and policy that fund them — come together into a single piece of applied research: a proposal for one specific safety intervention, defensible on more than one of those grounds at once.
The brief#
Propose one wildlife-vehicle safety intervention for one specific stretch of road or class of road, and defend it using evidence from at least three of the unit’s strands.
Scope this to what a regional road authority could plausibly fund and approve in a normal budget cycle — not a national rollout, and not a purely speculative technology. Picking something narrow and defending it thoroughly is a stronger strategy than surveying every option shallowly.
What you submit#
A single proposal document a road authority’s planning team could read without you there to walk them through it: the problem, the evidence for your chosen intervention, its cost and approval pathway, and what would count as evidence that it worked.
This assessment uses the holistic marking mode: the proposal is judged as a whole against the brief, described in prose above, rather than against a weighted criterion table.
The spec
The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part: what a marker checks. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for judgement.
- submitted by the deadline, as a single proposal document
- it recommends one specific intervention, for one specific stretch of road or class of road, not a general survey of options
- it argues from at least three of the unit's strands (ecology, data, physics, human factors, engineering, policy) rather than one
- it states a realistic cost and approval pathway for the jurisdiction it targets
- it stands on its own, without you there to explain it
How it is marked
The proposal is judged as a whole against the brief, with particular attention to whether it argues from evidence covered across the semester rather than from a single strand of it, whether its scope and costing are realistic for the jurisdiction it targets, and whether it stands on its own for a reader who wasn't in the room.