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Road kill 101

Road ecology seeks the most harmonious route

For most drivers, road kill is a grisly but briefly glimpsed punctuation mark to an otherwise mundane excursion.

The dead animals that line America's highways may inspire morbid fascination or revulsion in the average commuter, but they have haunted civic planners and scientists for decades.

Occasionally at great expense, newly built or upgraded roads need to accommodate a migrating herd of elk or blend gracefully into the breeding habitat of endangered salamanders, for example.

Emerging from this befuddlement of environmental regulation, logistical challenges and technical puzzles is the emerging science of road ecology. At its core, road ecology is simply the study of how roads and wildlife interact.

It's a relatively new scientific field, having been started in the 1980s, but it has taken off in the past decade as biologists, geologists, transportation and environmental engineers, and civic planners pushed for an approach to road building that could bring them all together.

“It's a new area, a new way of perceiving roads,” said Alison Berry, director of the Road Ecology Center at UC Davis. “People used to think of roads as moving things from point A to point B, as human and economic networks, but now it turns out that they're also part of the (natural) landscape.”

Berry is a plant biologist who studies, among other things, how air pollution along roadways can actually encourage the growth of invasive species.

In California, the birthplace of road ecology, UC Davis is working with Caltrans on how best to implement the recommendations of road ecologists such as Berry.

The evidence of the discipline's influence is everywhere, even if it's not readily apparent to the untrained eye. A good example is the cormorant nests built onto the sides of the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge.

The bridge, it turns out, isn't just used by humans driving to and from San Francisco. A colony of about 1,600 cormorants live in the iron web that supports the old bridge, and biologists worked with engineers and planners to come up with a way to make sure the black-winged beasts are welcome on the new structure.

“We are installing approximately 7,200 square feet of what we call cormorant nesting platforms,” said Amy Fowler, Caltrans' environmental compliance manager for the Bay Bridge project.

The platforms are made from a stainless-steel mesh and affixed to the inside sections of the eastbound and westbound concrete skyways so the birds can look from where they're nesting and see other birds.

“The birds are very colonial,” Fowler said. “They like to be with other birds.”

The mesh also allows the wind to blow the nests away when birds abandon them and lets biologists count the colony from boats below.

 

Human element

Another unheralded road ecology project involves roadkill, Caltrans crews and paperwork.

The department is developing a form that road crews can fill out when they discover dead deer, skunks and other unlucky critters. It should debut in the spring and will help planners better understand the kinds of creatures that live near the roads and migrate over them.

“What we're hoping to do is collate that information and plug that into the project-planning process,” said Gregg Erickson, chief biologist for Caltrans. “So they can take that into account with all the other factors when they're determining what the needs are for that stretch of road.”

The information would be used in what is already a somewhat unwieldy process to determine how to build roads so they damage the natural world as little as possible. Indeed, environmental regulations for years have forced developers to build culverts under roads to accommodate reptile migrations or install complicated drainage systems to prevent runoff from contaminating streams.

Road ecology embraces the human element, as well. Social scientists have joined the movement to help gather data about how individuals and institutions interact with road networks.

For example, dozens of government agencies can weigh in on how, where and when roads are built or maintained, but they usually don't share information very well.

“For air quality we have this whole elaborate set of institutions for data gathering and planning and enforcement and analysis,” said Dan Sperling, a transportation expert at UC Davis who is considered one of the godfathers of road ecology. “But if you think about it, (air pollution) is just one little piece of the road impact.

“We don't have the institutions that take into account these other impacts and definitely don't have the institutions to bring it all together, so it's not only an analytical problem, it's an institutional problem.”

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