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Building wildlife crossings on highways

Introversion

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That photo of a crab-crossing bridge is wild!

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...are-helping-reindeer-bears-and-even-crabs-aoe

The Guardian said:
Every April, Sweden’s main highway comes to a periodic standstill. Hundreds of reindeer overseen by indigenous Sami herders shuffle across the asphalt on the E4 as they begin their journey west to the mountains after a winter gorging on the lichen near the city of Umeå. As Sweden’s main arterial road has become busier, the crossings have become increasingly fractious, especially if authorities do not arrive in time to close the road. Sometimes drivers try to overtake the reindeer as they cross – spooking the animals and causing long traffic jams as their Sami owners battle to regain control.

“During difficult climate conditions, these lichen lands can be extra important for the reindeer,” says Per Sandström, a landscape ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences who works as an intermediary between the Sami and authorities to improve the crossings.

This week, Swedish authorities announced they would build up to a dozen “renoducts” (reindeer viaducts) to aid the crossings and allow reindeer herds to reach grazing more easily.

It is hoped the crossings will allow herders to find fresh grazing lands and alleviate traffic jams, and also help moose and lynx to move around the landscape. The country’s 4,500 Sami herders and 250,000 reindeer have been hit hard by the climate crisis, battling forest fires in the summer and freezing rain in the winter that hides lichen below impenetrable sheets of ice.

“The animals that will really benefit from this system are long-ranging mammals that are really not meant to survive in these small, isolated pockets,” says Sandström, who started his career in the US helping to create ecological corridors in Montana for grizzly bears.

The renoducts are part of a growing number of wildlife bridges and underpasses around the world that aim to connect fractured habitats. On the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico, underpasses have been used to shield jaguars from traffic. Natural canopy bridges in the Peruvian Amazon have helped porcupines, monkeys and kinkajous pass over natural gas pipelines. On Christmas Island, bridges have been built over roads to allow millions of red crabs to pass from the forest to the beaches on their annual migration.

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druid12000

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I've seen images of some of these bridges from around the world and some, like the ones in the link, are simply beautiful! While it may not be ideal, it is a step in the right direction. It works so much better than the deer crossing signs that the deer can't even read :roll:
 

Stytch

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There's one in Florida (USA) that is part of the old cross-Florida barge canal land (planned but thankfully never built). It goes over Interstate 75 in central Florida.
 

Woollybear

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We've got one in the final planning stages, construction is scheduled to break ground this year. It's to help the mountain lions disperse to protect against inbreeding. If you've seen the iconic photos of the Hollywood puma (P-22), you've seen our inbred mountain lions and the lengths they need to go to escape. The wildlife crossing has been decades in the making, and we are all very excited about it.
 

MaeZe

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Fun story: years ago my boyfriend and I traveled and we stopped in Fiji. We lived in a tent as much as possible so this night we'd set it up near the beach a little back in the jungle vegetation. There was a full Moon. Sometime in the middle of the night the crab march to the beach started. They just toddle forward blindly and go around things they bump into which in this case was our tent. It was so bizarre when crab shadows scraping along the tent in massive numbers started, especially when at first we didn't know what they were.
 
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