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	Wildlife Bridge  |  Public Lands | Transportation

Aligning Transportation Projects with State Wildlife Action Plans

Priority Conservation Need: Habitat Connectivity

Animals move on a daily, seasonal and lifetime basis to meet their needs for forage and breeding. Restrictions on these movements affect wildlife at all spatial scales, negatively impacting individual animals as well as populations. Because of these impacts, habitat fragmentation and loss are now recognized as one of the greatest threats to biodiversity and the decline of species worldwide. Transportation infrastructure, in particular, is a principal cause of habitat fragmentation and loss, with considerable impacts on wildlife. Animals are frequent victims of roadkill as they move from one part of their range to another, or they may avoid roads altogether, limiting their habitat area and ability to fulfill certain needs. The impacts are pervasive – a 16 foot-wide road removes approximately two acres of habitat per mile of road and edge effects extend at least 600 meters beyond the road footprint.        

The importance of habitat connectivity to ecosystem functionality for both terrestrial and aquatic wildlife is well documented in the literature, and there is a growing body of scientific research showing the importance of wildlife crossings in restoring wildlife habitat connectivity. Along the Trans Canada Highway in Canada’s Banff National Park, a series of 22 underpasses and two overpasses have decreased elk and deer deaths by 95 percent, with total roadkills down by 80 percent. Monitoring has shown more than 75,000 crossings of wildlife using these structures over the past 10 years.

Priority Conservation Need: Avoiding Impacts and Placing Effective Mitigation

Although transportation priorities are set well in advance of construction, many biologists and conservationists only comment at the Environmental Impact Statement stage in the process. At this point, it is often too late to avoid environmental impacts since most decisions are already in place. Furthermore, because highway projects are designed and implemented on a project-by-project basis often without a landscape scale perspective, mitigation must occur within the project boundary as opposed to the location where it is most effective. For these reasons, the current transportation planning process does not always ensure the right conservation mitigation happens in the right place.

With generous assistance from the Wildlife Conservation Society, SREP is embarking on an exciting new project in 2007 that seeks to to use State Wildlife Action Plans (Plans) in Colorado and New Mexico to accomplish the following objectives: 1) prepare and compile statewide data on key habitats, Species of Greatest Conservation Need, and wildlife linkages into an effective visual tool, 2) design an early warning system to alert planners to potential wildlife conflicts, 3) apply a “matchmaking” system to ensure mitigation is placed effectively, and 4) provide a clear framework for other states to follow.