Making the roads safe - for elk, bears, and wolves

December 19, 2000
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Original story - link verified on December 20, 2000
By Todd Wilkinson

Traffic engineers and biologists are coming together to design state-of-the-art wildlife overpasses and underpasses to keep peripatetic creatures from stepping onto the road. With 3.9 million miles of major asphalt roads crossing the US, a small but growing number of ecologists point to highways as a major wildlife-management issue here and around the world. One scientist believes that highways may be even more hazardous to the health of ecoysystems than local timber sales and mining. William Ruediger, a US Forest Service ecologist who specializes in forest carnivores, goes so far as to call the problem of roadkill, particularly for species pushed to the brink of survival, "the [wildlife] conservation issue of the 21st century."

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