Wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVC) can result in property damage, injury and death to drivers. WVC can similarly cause wildlife injury and mortality, as well as genetic fragmentation and other population impacts. State departments of transportation seeking to evaluate the need to reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions use evidence of WVC and other data to inform decisions about WVC mitigation. Mitigation infrastructure, such as wildlife crossings with exclusion fencing, are effective measures for reducing WVC.
Both stochastic and gradual sea level rise (SLR) from anthropogenic climate change threatens coastal communities and infrastructure world-wide. The major consequences of SLR to shoreline highway systems are twofold: 1) a degraded supply of transportation infrastructure; and 2) travel demand reduction induced by land/infrastructure flooding. There have been several recent and important studies of region-scale impacts of SLR on transportation systems and travel.
Across the US, mitigation of the spread of COVID-19 included “shelter-in-place” (SIP) orders and related actions, implemented by cities, counties, and governors’ offices. These orders resulted in a massive drop in traffic volumes and provided an unprecedented opportunity to measure the effect of reduced traffic on crashes, including collisions involving wildlife. For California, the Road Ecology Center at UC Davis processes and compiles real-time traffic incidents from California Highway Patrol reports, using a web-accessible database.
Habitat linkages are hypothetical objects developed in geographic information systems (GIS) proposed to connect areas of habitats in fragmented landscapes. Assuming they are used by organisms in nature, linkages could be an important tool for the maintenance of viable wildlife populations and biodiversity conservation.
Wildlife habitat is fragmented by transportation systems, a legacy of land-use and a continuing, often un-mitigated impact of transportation. The primary tools to reduce these impacts are discretionary projects to construct “wildlife crossing structures” (WCS) and associated fencing. Although WCS are relied upon to mitigate impacts to wildlife, little attention is paid to animal responses to noise and artificial light at night in designing these structures and the approaches to them.
Existing transportation and linear conveyance (e.g., aqueducts, pipelines) already bisect blocks of otherwise intact habitat for species at all levels, inhibiting movement and genetic flow in some cases. Often for decades. There is an evolving toolbox equipped with many measures to minimize and mitigated the effects, but little consistent evaluation of the “who, what, why, and where” of implementation and management of the tools.
Wildlife-vehicle conflict poses injury/mortality risks to both drivers and wildlife. Roadside Animal Detection Systems (RADS) are being developed and deployed to detect animals near or on roads and warn drivers to reduce speed and increase attentiveness. Animal detection systems include video/still camera, Radar, thermal imaging, and advanced Light Detection and Range (LiDAR) sensors. Cameras/video systems provide validation information for other sensor types and are sensors in their own right.
Wildlife camera traps are essential equipment when monitoring animal movement and occupancy in a region or near infrastructure-crossing structures. Large arrays of cameras (dozens to hundreds) result in large numbers (hundreds of thousands) of images, especially when any vegetation or traffic are in the camera view. Rapidly and accurately processing images through most workflows can involve a lot of staff time and potentially result in transcription and other errors.
