As I’ve driven along highways, interstates, or roads, I can’t help but notice the amount of roadkill I see at times; a raccoon here, a turtle there, but wait, there’s also a turkey vulture up ahead. It’s disheartening to see the amount of wildlife that have been susceptible to colliding with a vehicle on a road. Roadways act as a barrier to the locomotion of animals moving around in their environments; they have been shown to increase wildlife mortality and decrease the quality of their habitat. Roads have ecological impacts as well, including, but not limited to, fragmenting and destructing a habitat, interrupting ecological processes, and increasing pollution and erosion.
Looking at the Big Picture
To reduce the impacts roads have on wildlife populations, ecopassages have become integrated into the planning of roadway systems, or road ecology. Road ecology provides an integrated and solution-oriented framework for addressing the environmental effects of roads. The goal of road ecology is to provide planners with practical advice on how to avoid, minimize, or mitigate negative environmental impacts of transportation. From this, ecopassages have become well-known and improved upon by implementing effective steps into road ecology research. Ecopassages are overpass or underpass systems that are used to enhance wildlife movement over or under roads and have shown to lessen the impacts of road ecology; they reduce situations of wildlife morality, wildlife-vehicle collisions, and limited wildlife movement. Ecopassages are thought of as a solution to the impacts wildlife populations face from roads, and have been found to be effective and efficient in aiding wildlife to cross roads safely.
In the Real-World
An example of an effective and efficient ecopassage already implemented is the Payne’s Prairie Ecopassage located on US Highway 441 in Payne’s Prairie Reserve, Alachua County, FL. This ecopassage has a series of eight culverts – a tunnel under the road carrying an open drain or stream – that underlie the highway system with entrances and/or exits on either side (Figure 1). The researchers who studied this ecopassage found that it was effective and efficient through finding reduced number of roadkill on the road after the ecopassage was implemented. This ecopassage is just one example of how there are solutions to minimize the risk we pose to wildlife with implementing roadway systems into areas of land.
Wildlife have a place on this Earth, the same as humanity does. However, the biggest issue we face with coexisting with wildlife is that we pose threats to them from implementing things such as major transportation infrastructures. When humanity makes these big-scale plans, it’s important to remember the impact the infrastructure may pose to both the environment and to the wildlife populations within that environment. Roads are a useful infrastructure to humanity, as we use them to travel to all kinds of different places. Despite this, humanity also needs to take into consideration what’s around the roads as well: the created fragmentation of the habitat left surrounding the road, the wildlife attempting to live near these roads, and the possibility of the wildlife attempting to cross roads to travel from habitat to habitat. With these factors kept in mind and the continuing of implementing ecopassages into road ecology plans, hopefully the future will provide less impacts to wildlife populations so them along with humanity can coexist in more peace.
