New Jersey’s Animal Crossings Protect Our Wildlife From Dangerous Traffic
Dr. Meiyin Wu, a Professor of Biology, spoke with Pamela Weber-Leaf regarding these elevated overpasses and tunnels for animals to bypass roadways
Posted in: Biology, In The Media
When a roadway intersects with a river or a stream, a lot of times, the people who build that road don’t realize that this waterway or the mud nearby is where many reptiles and amphibians, such as frogs and salamanders, live, and when they surface to seek drier ground in the spring, they can’t just jump over the pavement. You end up with terrible mortality rates.
Dr. Wu serves as New Jersey’s liaison for the North Atlantic Aquatic Connectivity Collaborative, a network of academics, nonprofit environmentalists and government officials across a 13-state region stretching from Maine to West Virginia.
The success of the Bedminster project spurred the DEP to devise a similar setup in 2019 at the Assunpink Wildlife Management Area (WMA) in western Monmouth County. The trio of tunnels in Upper Freehold Township include one stream culvert that was widened to accommodate the addition of a dry shelf allowing wildlife to cross Route 539, and two more brand-new underground corridors linking the drainage channels on either side of the road. As with the Bedminster tunnels, fencing at each end steers the animals away from the pavement above and toward the lifesaving passageways.