The Importance of a Little Connection Congested roads crisscross the concrete maze of our cities, but sometimes they have unexpected travelers: animals. Wildlife corridors — linking animal populations across roads, agriculture or development — are often relegated to more natural settings. However, despite the challenges of balancing the demands of both wildlife and people, they’re needed in cities too.
For instance, over the past two decades, urban sprawl has crept over 14,000 square miles of undeveloped land in the U.S. alone, fueling biodiversity loss. Further, 20 percent of migratory species monitored by the U.N. are threatened, while 44 percent of them are declining.
Fortunately, cities are wising up to the importance of wildlife protection. Corridors for animals are popping up in urban areas from Botswana to Los Angeles.
“It’s literally just a beautiful space that provides safe passage for wildlife to pass through protected areas or connected habitats in the most basic form,” said Tempe Adams, an adjunct scholar and lecturer for the University of Botswana and the University of New South Wales. “And what’s really amazing about corridors is that you can have such different scales to them, so you can have tiny corridors that help toads cross roads, right up to corridors that allow elephants to move through townships.”
By facilitating the movement and migration of populations, these paths have a lot of benefits.
“They provide such a great long-term method to allow wildlife to continue accessing resources and moving through areas…” said Adams. “But it’s also a great mitigation tool to reduce human-wildlife conflict.”
Corridors provide access to food, shelter, nesting sites and mates. This improves the genetic diversity of populations and allows them to adapt to environmental changes — like development and global warming.
Corridors work best when placed in pathways that wildlife are already using, explained Adams. For instance, elephants have been using some pathways for 50 years. However, blocking animals’ natural movement can cause problems — potentially pushing them into rapidly developing urban areas, she added. And, when people and wildlife collide, that can cause problems.
“Debatably, roadkill is the most obvious form of conflict,” said Adams. “Sadly, we kind of forget about it, but roadkill obviously affects every kind of animal, and it takes human lives as well.”
Other issues include wildlife damaging property or crops, or the discomfort of sharing space with sometimes large wildlife.However, corridors can be a long-term solution to reduce human-wildlife conflict that keeps both humans and animals safe, explained Adams.
Given these wide-ranging benefits, more cities are incorporating corridors into their landscapes and development plans. For instance, Port Townsend’s Urban Wildlife Habitat Corridor connects forest and wetland habitat threatened by development. Thanks to the project, a variety of animals from migratory songbirds and amphibians can move safely across the landscape. On an even smaller scale, the citizens of Oslo created a bee highway. By planting meadows, replacing lawns with local grasses and wildflowers and encouraging citizens to keep hives on their rooftops and in their backyards, they’re safeguarding bees across the city.
But corridors aren’t limited to petite critters alone. In northern Botswana, African elephants are traversing urban corridors to reach rivers — including families with young calves.
“They’re engineers of the landscape,” said Adams. “So when elephants are on the move, they generally walk in a line. So they make these beautiful pathways.” In turn, these paths are used by other wildlife like buffalo, waterbuck, carnivores, and small mammals.
Many more are planned. For example, India is building underpasses for leopards and wildlife in the urban area of Delhi, while California is planning to open one of the world’s largest wildlife crossings just outside of Los Angeles in 2026.
In addition, a partnership between Occidental College and Arroyos & Foothills Conservancy is working to protect landscape connectivity across the Greater Los Angeles Area. By acquiring and restoring land, they’ll benefit animals like coyotes, mountain lions, mule deer and black They’re also engaged in community outreach and education.
Yet, wildlife corridors face multiple roadblocks in urban areas.
Finding and protecting enough space may be difficult, explained Adams, but her studies showed even mammoth elephants used narrow corridors.
Other difficulties include the fact that habitat patches may be separated by multiple roads and parcels of land. Thus, creating corridors may require buying or protecting many small parcels of land with different owners. Further, land can rapidly switch between owners and use in an urban environment, while illegal development poses another challenge. But the secret may be with the people themselves. “I think a lot of the issues [with corridors] is the actual implementation and making sure everyone understands what hat actually means,” said Adams. “Then informing the community, I think it’s the key to any success with this is making the decisions with those living in the corridor area… That’s really important that they’re part of that process and identify itbecause as soon as you do block off that space, you’re pushing those animals then into these newly developed areas.”
She added that thoroughly consulting with local residents, allowing feedback and educating them about corridors increases their buy-in.
An estimated 70 percent of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050. As a result, our need to coexist with surrounding wildlife will only increase. Further, because of climate change, half of the world’s species are already moving, often to higher latitudes.
Yet corridors are a hopeful trend accommodating both wildlife and people.
“The thing about the corridors is it’s great because it’s not saying no to development”, said Adams. “The reality is everywhere needs to develop, but it doesn’t mean we can’t be making smart decisions and actually make informed land use plans.”
About the contributor
Ruscena Wiederholt is a science writer based in Maryland with a background in biology and ecology. She regularly writes on climate change, agriculture, sustainability and the environment.
The original pages
As published in Issue 1: A World of Possibility. Click any page to view it full size.
First published in Issue 1: A World of Possibility, the Innately Science newspaper.