The Pro Lutra Foundation, based in Bern, is committed to the otter and its sustainable return to Swiss waters. This includes researching and removing obstacles that endanger the otter's return or make it unnecessarily difficult.
These include, for example, bridges that force the otter to cross the road because it is not possible to cross underneath. Unfortunately, many otters fall victim to these traffic bottlenecks if certain requirements for the bridge construction or the surrounding bank situation are not met. For example, in some bridge designs, otters are forced to cross on the upper side of the bridge because, for example, thresholds or high falls of a stream make it difficult to cross under the bridge, or because there is not enough space on the banks under the bridge for them to cross from one side to the other in the course of the stream.
Together with Irene Weinberger from Pro Lutra, Thomas Rawyler from Tegonal has developed a web application with which bridges can be recorded and marked as potential dangers for otters. Based on the data obtained in this way, the foundation can make suggestions for improvements that can be taken into account, for example, when bridges are renovated. Anyone can enter bridges that do not yet exist in the map and rate them with a danger index. Through crowd-sourcing, the Pro Lutra Foundation hopes for a fast and comprehensive recording of all bridge situations that are problematic for otters.
From a technical point of view: Thomas wrote a React app that gets its data from a parse backend and persists it with MongoDB.
For more information, see the project page "Untendurch" by Pro Lutra.