Wildlife interactions with transportation infrastructure includes aversion, barrier effects, genetic and population fragmentation, successful crossing, and wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVC). Reducing these effects often includes proposals for wildlife barrier-fencing (to reduce WVC) and crossings (to increase connectivity). Planning for wildlife fencing and crossings is usually considered the best solution, but requires detailed information and knowledge of the planning area to understand the micro and macro factors that contribute to the conflicts. Scientific planning of mitigation is best informed using sufficient spatial data to make good locational and other decisions.  

We have developed a web-based tool to facilitate the planning of wildlife fencing and crossing structures.  This tool builds on our previous experience of developing the Wildlife Crossing Calculator and incorporates many of the features and functions from this system into the new portal.  The first feature of the tool is a user-created bounding box on a digital map where wildlife mitigation is proposed. The box is used to clip spatial data from our own Road Ecology Center and other open data sources and provide download links for use in an external Geographic Information System (GIS).  Point data includes: 1) WVC observations from our California Roadkill Observation System (CROS) and California Highway Patrol (CHP) contributed California Highway Incident Processing System (CHIPS); 2) other wildlife observations from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility; 3) topographic markers indicating the relative elevation of the road and adjacent landscape; and 4) post-mile points. Line data includes: 1) highway and other transportation alignments, including associated traffic and other data; 2) densities and costs of WVC calculated annually for California from WVC data; and 3) streams/hydrology. Besides observation point data, we provide raster data from the BIOS project which show species range maps and a list of species found in the plan area.  We also provide clips of standard raster data from: 1) the USGS National Landcover Database (NLCD); 2) the National Hydrology Dataset (NHD) and Watershed Boundary Dataset (WBD); 3) the results of our own noise and light modeling; and 4) other data which aid in the understanding of the planning area.

Planning effective wildlife fencing and crossing structures requires detailed knowledge of the area it will be built, which this tool provides. Although the tool is being formatted for California, its standardization and use of federal datasets means that it could be used in any US state (and possibly elsewhere).