Y2Y is an ambitious project to create safe freeway crossings for animals from the Yukon to Yellowstone, in the form of overpasses and underpasses designed to lure animals into crossing away from traffic. That’s good news for animals — who are dying in increasing numbers from traffic fatalities — and good news for drivers. As Clive Thompson reports, “slamming into an enormous black bear at 60 miles an hour is kinetically equivalent to driving into a brick wall.”
Their goal is not just a wolf pack surviving here and there, or a few scattered grizzly bears or elk or bighorn sheep, but a landscape in which animals can thrive, roaming and reproducing widely and avoiding the genetic perils of small populations trapped in shrinking habitats.
When the researchers write up their findings for scientific journals, they call this goal “functional connectivity,” said Michael Proctor, a zoologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alberta. He calls it “sex across the highway.”
(via Collission Detection)