In 2005, the Montana Department of Transportation started to construct 29 road crossings for wildlife – mostly underpasses. In 2000, the Confederated Salish-Kootenai Tribes conditioned their permission for easements to widen the road on the state’s commitment to protect regional wildlife, asking highway officials to respect their belief that “the road is a visitor and that it should respond to and be respectful of the land and the Spirit of Place.” Montana is a fitting location for the institute, since pressure from that state’s indigenous groups ensured it is home to the most concentrated group of wildlife crossings anywhere, most built in the Flathead Reservation along the 90-mile length of state highway 93. Montana State University’s western transportation institute specializes in road ecology. The University of California, Davis, has a center devoted to the field. Can the newly emerged science of road ecology provide solutions that lead to a gentler roadprint?” road system ties the land together for us, providing unprecedented human mobility, yet it slices nature into pieces. Forman, the field is described in a 2003 book “Road Ecology: Science and Solutions.” A 2010 abstract in the journal “Environment” carried the headline: “The four-million-mile U.S. Developed by a Harvard landscape ecologist, Richard T. With highways and animal migration routes intertwined everywhere, a new academic discipline emerged in the first years of the 21st century: road ecology. Road ecology studies seek to make all journeys safer Unpublished report, Conservation Science Partners, Truckee, CA, USA. A guide to the Wildlife Crossing Structures Database v1. Source: Theobald, DM, V Landau, P Cramer, D Harrison-Atlas, C Monnroy, and J Lewis. The Wallis Annenberg Crossing in Agoura Hills.įurther north, a 90-foot underpass is being built across California’s Highway 17, which runs between the south San Francisco Bay area and Monterey Bay.Ĭongress whetted the appetite of states to construct their own crossings by including $350 million in the 2021 infrastructure act earmarked for this purpose. The most recent and soon to be the largest wildlife bridge in the country is an $87 million structure being constructed north of Los Angeles in Agoura Hills, California. It will allow mountain lions, foxes, and other wildlife to cross 10 lanes of Highway 101 without encountering a car. Other states were slow to follow its initial example until the 1990’s, when a tunnel, intended for frogs, was built in Davis, California. Utah now has about 60 wildlife crossings. There are now underpasses in every western state.Īn overpass in Beaver, Utah was the first such crossing in this country. The practice originated in France in the 1950s and quickly spread to the Netherlands, which now is home of the world’s longest wildlife bridge. The efforts to save both animals and people have led to a proliferation of road crossings for animals along traditional migration routes and other crucial locations. But a solution to this problem has taken hold around the region: wildlife crossings built under or over roads around the West, from San Antonio, Texas and North Dakota to Interstate 15 in Utah. When cars hit larger wildlife, it can also lead to human casualties and hefty car repair bills. More and faster roads inevitably mean more roadkill. But in places like the American West, roads that connect society often interrupt the migration routes of animal species -like elk, mountain lions, moose, and bighorn sheep - that often date back to the end of the last Ice Age. Roads are built with a purpose: to get people and goods where they need to go. Up Close We explore the issues, personalities, and trends that people are talking about around the West. Highway 85 in western North Dakota (North Dakota Department of Game and Fish) A bighorn sheep lies dead by the side of U.S.
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