Photo courtesy of Tonya Leonard

Additional Links

Safe Passage - Written for engineers, biologists, and conservationists in the western United States and Canada who are working in the field on wildlife crossings on a day-to-day basis. Safe Passage covers the technical aspects of creating the most ecologically effective and economically efficient wildlife crossings.
Critter Crossings - This federal site describes transportation effects on wildlife and highlights exemplary projects and processes that are helping to reduce these effects.
The Idaho Transportation Department

Miscellaneous

Amphibians and Reptiles - This report (Jochimsen et al. 2004) reviews the adverse biological and ecological effects roads have on amphibians and reptiles and examines methods to mitigate these effects. [PDF, 451 KB]

Idaho Transportation Department district boundaries.

Highway Wildlife Collisions

Wildlife and Transportation

In 2007, the Idaho Transportation Department awarded federal funding to the Idaho Department of Fish and Game to carry out two statewide projects with the goal of making Idaho's roads safer for drivers and wildlife.

The project objectives are:

Develop a statewide map and database of important "wildlife linkage" areas in relation to Idaho's highways and roads.

Wildlife linkage areas offer needed habitat requirements for wildlife populations and are critical for providing areas for wildlife movement across the landscape, such as seasonal mule deer migration routes. By incorporating linkage area information into transportation management decisions, transportation officials, land managers, and other interested parties will be able to make more informed assessments regarding the needs of wildlife in future highway projects.

The Idaho Highway Wildlife Linkage site is an online Wiki (an interactive site) that allows anyone to view and comment on all the Idaho wildlife-highway linkages and associated information in an easy-to-navigate format.

The following links are to the interim wildlife linkage reports completed to date:

Interim report for ITD districts 3, 4, & 5 [PDF, 8.2 MB]
Interim report for ITD district 6 [PDF, 4.8 MB]
Interim report for ITD district 1 [PDF, 13 MB]
Interim report for ITD district 2 [PDF, 13.2 MB]

Develop a statewide online wildlife-vehicle collision database tool to document and monitor wildlife mortality caused by vehicles.

The wildlife-vehicle collision database is a central repository for road kill data from state and federal roadways throughout the state of Idaho. This data is being collected by personnel from the Transportation Department, Fish and Game and other agencies, and is being maintained by Fish and Game in cooperation with Transportation.

Besides acting as a central repository, the database also allows users to enter and search wildlife-vehicle mortality data for all state and federal roadways in Idaho, potentially benefiting many interested people. The primary goal of this database is to enhance wildlife-vehicle data collection and management, which will allow wildlife mortality areas along Idaho's roadways to be identified and documented better. This is important to Idaho Fish and Game, as it manages Idaho's limited wildlife resources, and to Transportation, as it manages Idaho's roadways for safe travel.

The database will be available for public use soon.