Wildlife Crossing Structures: The Road to Success Dr Edgar van der Grift, Part 1

Environment Institute of Australia and New Zealand's National Symposium about finding engineering solutions to the ecological problems of linear infrastructures such as road and rail.

Roads and railroads may have a severe impact on wildlife. They have the potential to cause mortality in wildlife, disrupt animal movement and affect both the amount and quality of wildlife habitat. Consequently, transport networks can potentially jeopardize the long-term persistence of wildlife populations, communities and ecosystems. Around the world, road administrations and nature conservation organisations currently spend considerable amounts of money annually on engineering solutions such as wildlife crossing structures to increase the permeability of transport corridors for wildlife. In the Netherlands the construction of wildlife passages increasingly becomes standard procedure when building new roads. Furthermore, in 2004 a 410 million euro defragmentation program has been launched to improve habitat connectivity across existing (rail)roads. The question that consequently rises in response to such investments is: does it work?

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Science & Technology