What if the best way to design wildlife infrastructure was to listen to the animals themselves?

Wildlife crossings, exclusion fencing, wildlife gates and other mitigation measures are becoming increasingly important as roads and highways continue to intersect important wildlife habitat. But building a structure is only part of the solution. The real challenge is designing infrastructure that animals will actually use—and that works reliably over the long term.

Our latest video, “Designing Wildlife Infrastructure – What the Animals Told Us,” takes a closer look at this challenge and explores how observing animal behaviour can provide valuable lessons for designing more effective wildlife mitigation.

Let the animals show us what works

Wildlife don’t read engineering drawings or follow our assumptions about how a crossing should work. They respond to their surroundings, their instincts, and the obstacles we put in their way.

That means some of the most useful information for designing wildlife infrastructure can come from simply watching what animals do.

How do they approach a barrier?

Where do they hesitate?

What makes them turn around?

Where do they try to get through—or go around?

And perhaps most importantly: what design features encourage an animal to make the decision we want it to make?

These observations can reveal problems that may not be obvious from an engineering perspective.

Turning behaviour into better infrastructure

Effective wildlife mitigation requires more than simply keeping animals off a roadway. The goal is to guide them safely toward an appropriate crossing opportunity while minimizing the likelihood that they will find a way back onto the road.

Small details can make a surprisingly large difference.

The height and configuration of a fence, the shape of an opening, the placement of a gate, the visibility of the surrounding landscape, and even the way an animal encounters an obstacle can influence its behaviour.

By paying attention to these interactions, we can move from simply building wildlife infrastructure to designing infrastructure around wildlife behaviour.

Why this matters

When wildlife mitigation works, the benefits extend well beyond the animals.

Effective infrastructure can help reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions, improve driver safety, maintain habitat connectivity and make transportation corridors less disruptive to wildlife movement.

But poorly designed or poorly functioning infrastructure can create its own problems. Animals may find gaps, climb or jump barriers, become trapped, or simply refuse to use a crossing.

That is why continued observation, testing and refinement are so important.

Watch the video

If you’re involved in road ecology, wildlife management, transportation engineering, environmental planning, fencing, wildlife crossings or infrastructure design, this video offers an opportunity to look at wildlife mitigation from a different perspective.

Rather than asking only “How do we build this?”, we should also be asking:

“What is the animal telling us?”

Watch “Designing Wildlife Infrastructure – What the Animals Told Us” and see how observing wildlife behaviour can help us develop better solutions for sharing the landscape with wildlife.

Better wildlife infrastructure starts with understanding the wildlife it’s designed for.