What happens when wildlife cross the road?

[pmbryant]

From Audubon magazine: June 2003

RIGHT OF WAY

Every year, all kinds of wildlife, including many endangered species, are killed crossing America's highways. Now biologists and land planners are teaming up to design ecofriendly roads that animals can traverse without having to risk life and limb.

By Peter Chilson

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After nearly four years of talks, Jacobson has convinced Idaho highway engineers to include three wildlife underpasses in phase one of a 17-mile reconstruction project in another section on the northernmost stretch of Route 95. The concrete underpasses—13 feet high, 23 feet wide, and 80 feet long—cost $400,000 apiece, not including fencing to keep the animals off the road and to guide them to the structures. Jacobson, who worked on wildlife and transportation issues for the national forests in the Idaho panhandle (she now keeps an eye on the Route 95 project from her new job as a biologist with the Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station in Arcata, California), expects that "punching holes" in Route 95 will make it safer for both wildlife and drivers.

Don Davis, an engineer and leader of the highway project, expects work to begin this summer. He concedes that road designers have long been guilty of laying down asphalt with no consideration for beings other than humans. But now, he says, engineers are under more pressure from federal agencies like the U.S. Forest Service to change their ways. "We need to show more sensitivity to the surrounding area rather than having a sterile highway going down the middle," Davis says.

Every year, collisions with deer alone cause millions of dollars in vehicle damage and 12,000 human injuries nationwide, according to the American Automobile Association. The impact on wildlife is, if anything, harsher. The nation's 4 million miles of roads fragment habitat and threaten species. For example, roads have helped reduce the population of the ocelot, an extremely endangered cat native to the Southwest, to 80 individuals. Roads have devastated amphibian populations and the wetlands where they live, including most of the habitat of California's red-legged frog.

Wildlife crossings have proven successful in Europe, where the loss of wildlife and habitat is a centuries-old issue. Europeans have been trying to protect animals from roads since the 1950s, and they are now sharing what they've learned with U.S. biologists and engineers. Richard Foreman, a landscape ecologist at Harvard University, says the country needs a broad national policy covering roads and the environment. "The overall goal of transportation is safe and efficient mobility, and the secondary goal is to minimize the environmental devastation," he says. " has done the first brilliantly and the second very poorly."

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More: http://magazine.audubon.org/cuttingedge/cuttingedge0306.html