Bridges and Tunnels in Colorado Are Helping Animals Commute

In 2016 and 2017, New York City installed infrastructure designed to slow down drivers making left-hand turns in more than 200 locations and banned left turns at high-risk spots as a way to curb pedestrian crashes. Since then, median left-turn speeds have dropped 19 percent at those intersections and the number of vehicles cutting turns so closely they cross the double yellow lines declined by 79 percent. Now cities like San Jose and Los Angeles are looking to follow New York’s lead.

To reintroduce captive birds into their native lands, wildlife biologists are implementing rather unconventional methods of behavioral conditioning to train species how to behave when approached by a predator.

The Indigenous Adi tribe of Arunachal Pradesh, India, builds “living fences” by attaching barbed wire to the trunks of orchid trees to protect the mithun they are rearing, a sacred species of cattle listed as vulnerable by the International Union For Conservation of Nature. Many of the mithuns died from conflict with humans and animal attacks when they were left to free-range graze.

China originally gifted pandas to the U.S. as a diplomatic gesture, but it has evolved into a major conservation effort, protecting pandas, their environments and several other species. Researchers studied the pandas in zoos and used assisted reproduction to help increase the population. In the late ‘70s, there were about 1,000 pandas left in the wild. Now, that number has nearly doubled, including the several hundred in captivity, and pandas moved up from an endangered species to a vulnerable one in 2021, thanks to these conservation efforts.

At the Frozen Zoo in San Diego geneticists collect and freeze animal cells, including those of endangered animals, in cryogenic tanks for research and conservation projects.

The Pangolin Conservation Guild Nigeria is a nonprofit educating the public on the importance of the declining pangolin population, the laws against hunting them, and how to keep them from going extinct. The organization also contains a task force to rescue captured pangolins and return them to the wild.

Scientists and conservationists reintroduced the pool frog to England after proving that the species was once native to the country but had gone extinct. Members of the species, ranging from tadpoles to mature frogs, were collected in Sweden and then introduced to two different sites in England. The efforts have been successful, with populations dispersing on their own to other locations in the region.

The North Luangwa Conservation Program provides financial and technical support to protect and grow the population of black rhinos at North Luangwa National Park in Zambia.

As human infrastructure continues to threaten animal habitats, researchers are coming up with ways to use artificial structures as bridges for these creatures to get where they need to go. In Indonesia, irrigation pipes help farmers water their crops, but they’re also used by slow lorises to cross over the farmlands. In Brazil, a bridge crossing a major highway will be used by golden lion tamarins to avoid the busy traffic.

Reconfiguring streets to slow automobile traffic through its downtown business district and encourage pedestrians and bicycling enlivened South Bend's street life and proved a boon to its restaurants and other businesses. Then-Mayor Pete Buttigieg pushed for the $25 million plan to make the streets safer and encourage people to spend more time and money in the area. Drivers complained about increased travel time, as they have about other cities’ “complete streets” programs. But Buttigieg and his supporters hope to push the concept when he runs the federal Transportation Department.