Saturday, March 7, 2015

Always a fun and learning weekend when Ecologist Cristina Eisenberg shares her latest Huffington Post Blog Post with us................Today Cristina focuses in on the effectiveness of Wildlife Over/Under Passes and gives us an up close and in person evaluation of how the "grandndaddy" of all culvert paradigms, the 60 wildlife highway crossings traversing Banff National Park in Canada( very busy Highway 1 slices through the Park between Canmore and Lake Louise) are preventing wildlife/auto collisions.....................Cristina(along with Dr. Anthony Clevenger, senior research scientist at the Western Transportation Institute, Montana State University) informs us that: "Initially people didn't think animals were using the crossing structures"............. "Some objected to millions of taxpayer dollars being spent in this manner".................."It is so rewarding to know that In 17 years, there has been 160,000 documented individual wildlife crossings"................."Grizzly bears prefer overpasses; cougars prefer underpasses; and wolves and moose prefer larger, more open structures"..........."It took ungulates four to five years to adapt to using the structures, it took large carnivores six to nine years"..............."Had there been Park monitoring for two years (as is common in most studies due to funding limitations), it would have been concluded that the structures weren't working for grizzly bears".................... "In Banff, this wildly successful wildlife conservation project had reduced roadkill by 80 percent for large mammals, and by 95 percent for ungulates"...............I hope that Caltrans in the Los Angeles region as well as Mary Wiesbrock of SAVE OPEN SPACE in Agoura, California will pick up on this article by Cristina and utilize it to both get the necessary funding and to install both under and overpasses at the Chesbro exit on the 101 so as to allow the dozen Pumas that still call Los Angeles home the ability to "spread their genes to other Pumas both north and south of the City of Angels

From: "Eisenberg, Cristina";Cristina.Eisenberg@oregonstate.edu;
Date: March 7, 2015 at 10:38:06 AM PST
To: Rick Meril ;rick.meril@gmail.com
Subject: New HuffPo blog entry

Hi Rick,

Here is my latest Huffington Post blog entry, please share!

click on this link to read full article:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cristina-eisenberg/safe-passages-or-how-did-grizzly-bear_b_6787160.html

Looks like it's starting to thaw out here in Concord, MA. Spring is around the corner, although we still have 2-3 feet of hard-packed snow on the ground.

Take care,

Cristina