page_title: Wildlife crossing
section_title: Wildlife-vehicle collisions
hierarchical_section_title: Wildlife crossing / Wildlife-vehicle collisions
caption_attribution_description: English: Animals' Bridge on Route 93 near Evaro, Montana, on the Flathead Indian Reservation. Sign in English and Salish language.&#91;1&#93; ↑ Devlin, Vince&#32;(Cot. 3, 2010).&#32;"Cameras show wildlife use Highway 93 North overpass and tunnels". The Missoulian.&#32;Missoula, MT:&#32;missoulian.com. Retrieved on Feb. 28, 2011.
context_page_description: Wildlife crossings are structures that allow animals to cross human-made barriers safely. Wildlife crossings may include underpass tunnels or wildlife tunnels, viaducts, and overpasses or green bridges; amphibian tunnels; fish ladders; canopy bridge, tunnels and culverts; and green roofs.
  Wildlife crossings are a practice in habitat conservation, allowing connections or reconnections between habitats, combating habitat fragmentation. They also assist in avoiding collisions between vehicles and animals, which in addition to killing or injuring wildlife may cause injury to humans and property damage.
  Similar structures can be used for domesticated animals, such as cattle creeps.
context_section_description: In addition to conservation concerns, wildlife-vehicle collisions have a significant cost for human populations because collisions damage property and injure and kill passengers and drivers.  Bruinderink & Hazebroek (1996) estimated the number of collisions with ungulates in traffic in Europe at 507,000 per year, resulting in 300 people killed, 30,000 injured, and property damage exceeding $1 billion. In parallel, 1.5 million traffic accidents involving deer in the United States cause an estimated $1.1 billion in vehicle damage each year (Donaldson 2005). On a larger scale, research indicates that wildlife-vehicle collisions in the United States result in 29,000 injuries and more than 200 fatalities per year.
  The conservation issues associated with roads (wildlife mortality and habitat fragmentation) coupled with the substantial human and economic costs resulting from wildlife-vehicle collisions have caused scientists, engineers, and transportation authorities to consider a number of mitigation tools for reducing the conflict between roads and wildlife.  Of the currently available options, structures known as wildlife crossings have been the most successful at reducing both habitat fragmentation and wildlife-vehicle collisions caused by roads (Knapp et al. 2004, Clevenger, 2006).
  Wildlife crossings are structural passages beneath or above roadways that are designed to facilitate safe wildlife movement across roadways (Donaldson 2005).  In recent years, conservation biologists and wildlife managers have advocated wildlife crossings coupled with roadside fencing as a way to increase road permeability and habitat connectivity while decreasing wildlife-vehicle collisions.  Wildlife crossing is the umbrella term encompassing underpasses, overpasses, ecoducts, green bridges, amphibian/small mammal tunnels, and wildlife viaducts (Bank et al. 2002).  All of these structures are designed to provide semi-natural corridors above and below roads so that animals can safely cross without endangering themselves and motorists.
caption: "Animals' Bridge," on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, used by grizzly and black bears, deer, elk, mountain lions, and others[7]
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