Banff National Park wildlife corridor image from Wikimedia Commons, attributed to m01229.
Animal vehicle collisions (AVCs) make up 50% of all reported automobile accidents along rural roadways and highways in Alberta, Canada, resulting in six human fatalities per year.1 For our project, we set out to import datasets from various national and provincial institutions to represent data on incident locations, species range, traffic density, and other factors in AVCs. By combining these factors and executing geographic information systems (GIS) analyses, we identified sites that are suitable for new wildlife road crossings to protect human and nonhuman life. We focused on areas along Crowsnest Highway in the Southern Alberta Rockies, an area identified by past research as an AVC hot spot.2 As shown in the “Crowsnest Proposed Locations” tab, we identified six wildlife crossing areas in Crowsnest, Alberta that were determined with overlapping a 100-meter highway buffer and modeled suitable locations. These recommendations are based on the data models and analyses conducted in a GI system along with characteristics extrapolated from the well-known preexisting wildlife crossing network in Banff National Park. Explore the rest of our website to learn more about our findings and the data we used.
Citations
1 Lee, T., Ford, A., Creech, T., & Sanderson, K. (2019). Improving Human and Wildlife Safety Along Alberta’s Highway Network. Miistakis Institute. https://www.rockies.ca/
2 Clevenger, A. P., Hardy, A., & Gunson, K. (2006). Analyses of Wildlife-Vehicle Collision Data: Applications for Guiding Decision-Making for Wildlife Crossing Mitigation and Motorist Safety. II. Methods and Applications – Hotspot Identification of Wildlife-Vehicle Collisions for Transportation Planning. Utah State University. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242116385