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How do they get wildlife to use these? Do they just line the road with fences to funnel animals into the purpose-built crossings? What length of road can one

How do they get wildlife to use these? Do they just line the road with fences to funnel animals into the purpose-built crossings? What length of road can one of these crossings support? Are there any measures for how effective these crossings are at reducing wildlife collisions? These things sound good on paper but I wish the article more information to back them up. EDIT: Another commenter pointed out the article does provide a metric for the effectiveness of these crossings in the first paragraph: 90%.

GavinMcG 5y ago
Yes, they put up fences to funnel animals. There are indeed measures for how effective they are. It sounds like you're bothered that this article for popular consumption isn't an entirely different piece about the same topic.
- CivBase 5y ago
  I'm bothered that this article appears to advocate for more of these crossings without including any useful information on the subject. It's making an argument with no data to back it up and few details about how these crossings even work. The article at least cites some research about how many injuries and deaths are caused by wildlife collisions, but it doesn't give any information about how much animal crossing infrastructure helps with that. The videos are cute, but not very informative. Aside from that, it's mostly just qualitative assessments from a few biologists and environmentalists. Why should the kind of information I'm asking for be absent from an article for "popular consumption"? I'm not asking for a research paper. Would mainstream readers be turned off by sentences like "Tall fences keep wildlife off the roads and funnel them towards structures which allow them to cross safely," or "A large crossing like the one pictured above can provide safe crossing for animals along a 20 mile stretch of road," or "After a crossing is built, traffic collisions with wildlife usually decrease by 50% to 80% according to the ACME Research Group"? Maybe the lack of substance to this article has something to do with why it fell off the front page so quickly.
  - meridional 5y ago
    In the first paragraph: > Collisions have dropped by roughly 90 percent. No link to the source of this number though.
    - CivBase 5y ago
      Thank you! That's the big piece of info I was looking for. I can't believe I missed that.

GavinMcG 5y ago

Yes, they put up fences to funnel animals. There are indeed measures for how effective they are. It sounds like you're bothered that this article for popular consumption isn't an entirely different piece about the same topic.

CivBase 5y ago
I'm bothered that this article appears to advocate for more of these crossings without including any useful information on the subject. It's making an argument with no data to back it up and few details about how these crossings even work. The article at least cites some research about how many injuries and deaths are caused by wildlife collisions, but it doesn't give any information about how much animal crossing infrastructure helps with that. The videos are cute, but not very informative. Aside from that, it's mostly just qualitative assessments from a few biologists and environmentalists. Why should the kind of information I'm asking for be absent from an article for "popular consumption"? I'm not asking for a research paper. Would mainstream readers be turned off by sentences like "Tall fences keep wildlife off the roads and funnel them towards structures which allow them to cross safely," or "A large crossing like the one pictured above can provide safe crossing for animals along a 20 mile stretch of road," or "After a crossing is built, traffic collisions with wildlife usually decrease by 50% to 80% according to the ACME Research Group"? Maybe the lack of substance to this article has something to do with why it fell off the front page so quickly.
- meridional 5y ago
  In the first paragraph: > Collisions have dropped by roughly 90 percent. No link to the source of this number though.
  - CivBase 5y ago
    Thank you! That's the big piece of info I was looking for. I can't believe I missed that.