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Monitoring also shows that different species have different preferences: grizzly bears, deer, moose, and elk favour the open air of the overpasses, while cougars and black bears prefer the cozy coverage the tunnels provide.
The crossings also help maintain genetic diversity in wildlife populations, reconnecting the habitat on either side of the highway and allowing the different groups of the same species to interact.
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Parks Canada has some YouTube videos from trail cameras they installed in order to see what wildlife actually uses these and how quickly they started using them once construction was complete. Pretty neat to watch.
I’d look up links but I’m on mobile and lazy…
We also have a few of them in Austria, are they rare in America?
Sorry to say I've been in more states than not, and I've never encountered one. To be fair, my kids attend public school in trailers, so, you know, I don't think the deer are gonna be getting amenities any time soon, but who knows?
From Wikipedia:
In the United States, thousands of wildlife crossings have been built in the past 30 years, including culverts, bridges, and overpasses.
The source article is from 2003.
Interesting, as a European I haven't seen them that much in countries I visited (France, Spain, Italy)
They're very common in the Netherlands, at least
Might be their tallest land features!
F you!
I mean it's true but..
Could be worse. Denmark is similarly flat, but has a manmade ski hill...built on top of a trash heap. They've got it worse for "goofy attempts at raising their maximum elevation"
The Netherlands sincerely considered building an artificial mountain just so we could have ONE, but discarded it because it wasn't goedkoop
Which is the most Dutch fact I knot, closely followed by “you can cycle from the north of Groningen to the south of (Dutch) Limburg in just under a day”
TIL
I've seen plenty of them in France, it's actually quite common. They are called écoponts.
Very interesting
18 ecoponts in ten years: https://radio.vinci-autoroutes.com/article/le-succes-des-ecoponts-9639
Cette initiative est vraiment une nouveauté dans le paysage français, parce qu'en Europe, il y en avait déjà notamment aux Pays-Bas, en Suisse, en Autriche.
Indeed already present in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria
You see them in lots of locations in Germany as well as the Netherlands and France
Some parts of France have many of them above "autoroutes".
We have had them for forever in swiss too.
Im in the US and the county forest preserve system has the opposite for the deer. Tunnels under the roads. People could use them to but they tend to get muddy. I wish it was more like this.
From the case studies I we had to read in Enviro science, the tunnels don't really work unfortunately
We have a big one here in WA! I do want more of them, though. Makes the highway look prettier, too.
The article doesn't state how big the "area" is, but the employ fences along the sides for quite a ways in order to make it hard for animals to just get on the highways, and that while the 80% is overall, it states that deer and elk collisions went all the way down to 96% less.
I always wondered, why don't they just move the deer crossing signs to less trafficky areas that are safer for them to cross?
I'm still hoping that we could get these built in BC as there's been too many grizzly bear deaths recently
Isn't this usual? We have these every 20km here in Dalmatia.
I did not know that there were tunnels underneath as well. Are the tunnels at all of the crossings? I know they are just finishing a new one a bit west of calgary.
