“We know that grizzlies are known to treat roads as impassible when there’s as few as 100 cars a day on a road,” said Linnard. Linnard said a staggering 30,000 vehicles buzz through the valley on the Trans-Canada Highway every day throughout summer – and that equates to approximately one car every two-and-a-half seconds. In addition to being a critical wildlife link in the Y2Y region, the Bow Valley is also a busy thoroughfare for people. The Bow Valley is considered one of the four most important east-west wildlife connectors in the entire 3,200-kilometre length of the Y2Y region and one of two important connectors for wildlife in Alberta.ĭeer, elk, bighorn sheep, moose, cougars, lynx, wolves, black bears and grizzly bears use the high quality habitat along the Bow River valley bottom to move between the protected areas of Banff National Park and Kananaskis Country. “The project will take three years to complete.” “The tender closes December 2, with construction expected to begin in spring 2022,” said Rob Williams, press secretary to Alberta Transportation Minister Rajan Sawhney in an email. It is part of a $15 million spend over three years to identify problem areas for vehicle-wildlife collisions. “Different animals need different kinds of crossing structures in different locations depending on their needs, and this is obviously a huge step towards making that a greater possibility.”Īlberta Transportation completed a detailed design of the wildlife overpass in 2020 and put the project on the capital books for 2020-21. It’s a really significant step forward for mitigating the impacts of highways on wildlife in Alberta,” said Adam Linnard, Y2Y’s Alberta program manager. The Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) Conservation Initiative was delighted to hear the news, particularly in light of a growing body of evidence around the world showing crossing structures and associated fencing help prevent car crashes and save the lives of people and wildlife. The steel arch wildlife overpass to be built at a collision hotspot near Bow Valley Gap east of Lac Des Arcs – the first of its kind in Alberta outside of Banff National Park – was put out to public tender on Nov. The underpasses should be completed and operational by the fall.CANMORE – Alberta Transportation is formally asking for construction bids on the long-awaited wildlife overpass on a deadly stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway east of Canmore. The $2.8 million project was funded largely in part by a Federal Highways Transportation Enhancement grant. The tunnels are adjacent to the University of California, Berkeley’s Sagehen Creek Field Station in the Sagehen Experimental Forest, which will give scientists access to the forest’s research facilities and monitoring equipment. Built to near identical dimensions and only located a mile apart from each other, the underpasses will allow scientists to manipulate conditions to learn what might make an underpass more appealing to wildlife.įor instance there might be things that cancel out noise or add cover within the tunnels that might promote use among smaller animals.
![wildlife underpass wildlife underpass](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/pFFNhSlprkc/maxresdefault.jpg)
While wildlife crossings exist across the country, the Highway 89 crossings will be unique in their value to science. “Studies have shown that well-placed wildlife crossings, coupled with fencing, can reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions by as much as 75 to 100 percent,” said Sandra Jacobson, a wildlife biologist with Pacific Southwest Research Station. The team broke ground last May on its second and third wildlife underpasses along a 25-mile stretch of Highway 89 between Truckee and Sierraville, California. Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station scientists, along with their collaborators in the Highway 89 Stewardship Team, are paving the way to reduce those statistics with their latest project. roughly 200 people are killed in as many as 2 million wildlife-vehicle collisions and at a cost of more than $8 billion, according to the Western Transportation Institute.īut the U.S.