Imagine that you could close your eyes, point to a map and wherever your finger lands, you would be in that spot when you open your eyes. If you did this anywhere in the United States, at any point you picked, you would be within 22 miles of a road. And, there is an 80% chance you would be within just one mile of the nearest road (Riitters and Wickham, 2003).

Road are everywhere. In fact, if you were to consolidate all of the roads and parking lots in the US into one place, you’d have enough asphalt to pave the entire state of North Carolina (USDOT 2014).

All of these roads are a major burden for wildlife and ecosystems. Roads impact wildlife through direct mortality from vehicle collisions and also indirect effects associated with habitat loss and fragmentation, behavioral avoidance, pollution, etc. that always accompany roads. Because of all of these factors, transportation infrastructure is one of the largest impacts humans have on ecosystems.

Since it doesn’t look like we will curtail our love-affair with roads any time soon (current forecasts project total worldwide roads to increase by 60% in the next 35 years (Dulac, 2013)), I am interested in figuring out how we can design roads to be more wildlife friendly.

I got into road ecology during my Masters work at the University of Montana. I worked on the Flathead Indiana Reservation where over 40 wildlife crossing structures have been installed in just a 90km stretch (with many more to come). I used motion activated trail cameras to analyze relative movements of wildlife to estimate the structures’ effectiveness.

Dulac J. 2013. Global land transport infrastructure requirements: estimating road and railway infrastructure and costs to 2050. International Energy Agency, Paris, France.

Riitters, K. H., and Wickham, J. D. (2003). How Far to the Nearest Road? Front. Ecol. Environ. 1, 125.

[USDOT] U.S. Department of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics. 2014. National Transportation Statistics 2014.