Dr. Patricia Cramer
An interview with wildlife scholar, researcher, and founder of the Wildlife Connectivity Institute.
1. When you began your journey in transportation and road ecology work, what were the challenges you faced in moving key decision makers towards recognizing wildlife crossings as an important addition to building new roadways and renovating existing roadway infrastructure?
To make a change in society, you’ve got to show people they have a vested interest in that change. Our first project in this world was Paynes Prairie US 441, south of Gainesville Florida. A half dozen to one dozen wildlife ecologists saw the death toll of alligators, snakes, turtles, great blue herons, and frogs on this highway that bisects a state preserve. We banded together, and with the mantra, “DOT is our friend” we kept up a campaign to get Florida DOT to work with us to build a wall and place additional wildlife crossing structures on this wet prairie. We had a letter writing campaign to the local newspapers, and reached out to local politicians. There are great biologists within DOT’s and they are the lonely ones who have been trying to get these wildlife crossing structures for years. The challenge was convincing the people within FDOT that had their hands on the purse strings that this was worthy. So we supported the Florida DOT biologist who wanted this too. I always believe in money falling from the sky after this. There was a million dollar project in Miami that fell through and FDOT had to spend the money. Our group and supporters within FDOT were there with open arms and ready to accept it. That’s how the four new wildlife underpasses, and concrete wall to funnel animals to them were built.
2. Today, you are a national leader in transportation ecology having founded The Wildlife Connectivity Institute. What research techniques do you employ when mapping out wildlife movement, working through wildlife crossing structure planning and implementation, and everything in between? What partnerships have been critical to your success?
Mapping wildlife movement has several different components, and I started down this path with my PhD in the 1990’s, writing computer code to create a model that mimicked what would be reintroduced Florida panther movements in North Florida
Your base of these models is empirical data which means telemetry data of the movements of the species of interest in a specific landscape. You model what you predict would be their movements in other places, or in those places they are collared, and test models with other telemetry data you didn’t use in the model. This is for specific species in specific places. I am working with Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and Washington DOT as part of a team to model wildlife connectivity across the state. This is such a herculean task that we start with modeling ecosystems, human foot print, and other landscape factors rather than looking at specific species. Stay tuned for those results in the summer of 2025 to see the latest and greatest of modeling statewide landscape connectivity for many species.
https://www.wildlifeconnectivity.org/washington-wahcap
Partnerships are important. Although I typically work directly with the transportation departments, I also know that buy in and participation with the state wildlife agency is critical. I work and have worked in states where those relationships can be distrustful for past reasons. We wind up with maps and reports that don’t fully help wildlife as well as they could if all the parties could trust one another and share data. So data on where wildlife are known to move, and where agencies want to keep them protected and restored is key. We build on that and create GIS layers of ecological and transportation priorities for reducing wildlife-vehicle collisions, and set up a feasibility layer to prioritize which areas should and can be addressed most quickly.
3. Your organization has partnered with many others to help lead the charge in creating wildlife crossing structures with climate change in mind. How do you help researchers and scientists identify ways to increase habitat connectivity specific to climate change and the potential of a future climate crisis event?
Well, we just participated in a study paper on just that, with the support of Pew Charitable Trust (https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/fee.2816). We have some suggestions in there. I find that most states do not have climate change projection maps. So we have to think about these things that are also of concern for the state transportation agencies. First, changes in climate affect winter snow melt and runoff, hurricane events, sea level rise, and all things water. These water timings and flows then affect the bridges and culverts of a transportation system. We ask and encourage the DOT’s to consider the transportation system’s resiliency to climate change. We try to convince them that larger culverts, and bridges rather than culverts are the way to go. We ask that they include at minimum terrestrial pathways along the 100-year floodplain, so terrestrial species can move under the highways at these culverts and bridges. Second, we know wildlife, insects, and plants will need to move north and up in elevation as the planet warms and dries. In New Mexico we looked at prioritizing structure locations for pronghorn in the north east of the state, under I-25, to move in response to the drying and heating up of the prairies that will turn to deserts in the next 50 or so years. Modeling climate changes is a way to project where wildlife need to move. Another simple approach is to place crossing structures at features that don’t change – riverine areas, and ridge lines, in protected areas of course. Our manual to help researchers, practitioners, and the public integrate wildlife into transportation planning also has some other suggestions.
See: https://www.wildlifeconnectivity.org/national-study-to-integrate-wildlife-into-transportation
4. This year, you and your team were awarded the 2024 Environmental Excellence Award in Environmental Research. This award highlights the work you and your partners completed in creating a national study, Manual for Strategic Integration of Wildlife Mitigation into Transportation Procedures to help reduce wildlife-vehicle strikes and increase habitat connectivity. Can you walk us through the details of this project and how gathering crash data played a critical role in its impact for your partners in the United States and Canada?
Sure. There are many great efforts going on across the U.S. and Canada for connecting landscapes for wildlife. All future efforts could learn from those who have been doing this within and outside transportation departments and wildlife agencies. In this pooled fund study, supported by 16 agencies in the U.S. and Canada, our goal was to learn of what works, what those in the trenches of conservation think, and how to affect change in agencies and Metropolitan Planning Organizations, which are planning entities within communities of 50,000 people or more. It is important that if you want to change a process, you study it to learn how that can be done. I’ve been working with transportation agencies for two decades now, and have learned that your needs for wildlife need to be presented in the planning processes 10 or more years before the plans result in a project. That means a commitment to sticking with it to see that a wildlife crossing gets built, and taken care of over time. To start, you get wildlife crash data compiled to get the engineers to see this is a motorist safety issue as well, and that they can do something about it. You also look at the types of crashes, from just property damage to injury and fatal crashes. You tally up an annual average of each of these types, apply a cost to society from your DOT, and one from Federal Highways, and show the cost to society for these reported crashes alone. Now of course this is just the first step. It doesn’t help smaller animals. But it’s a start. However, if you look at our map below, you can see that the most crashes reported with wildlife are in the mid-west, yet this region of the country has the least number of wildlife crossing structures. But these crashes are a start of the conversation. Then you talk of climate change resiliency and getting structures to be replaced with larger ones that accommodate wildlife, along with some guide fences, and retrofits to existing culverts and bridges that could encourage wildlife use for little cost. Then you bring in wildlife connectivity and the need for aquatic and terrestrial life to move under and over highways. There are several approaches, dependent on the state and geography. For example we are working in Massachusetts as well, and while it is not a wild area, we are trying to find ways to provide connectivity for deer, black bear, turtles and aquatic species, with the first step being the crash data. It is a progression, and an evolution within a state.
Figure below is from Federal Highways’ Public Roads Magazine: https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/winter-2023/04
5. With the recent news heard around the world regarding the vehicle strike mortality that took the life of famed grizzly bear matriarch, 399, how can we prevent this from happening again sooner rather than later? What advances in technology can help us protect wildlife traversing across roadways now before wildlife crossings can be built?
It is a sad time for those of us that loved 399 from close and afar. Teton County, WY where 399 lived has a master plan for wildlife crossing structures, and they have been building them at a rapid rate in the past 10 years. We just can’t get them in fast enough, it takes 5-10 years to get a wildlife crossing structure from commitment to final build. I study technology. We are looking at wildlife-detection driver warning systems in Colorado and Utah. I work with animals because they are easier to train than humans! People are in a damn hurry, almost all the time. We can funnel wildlife to a certain area along the highway, where motorists will know to look for them. Our current findings are seeing some slow down. However, large 18-wheeler trucks do not. I watch video feed from cameras in these studies, and watch large trucks with heavy loads plow through deer without even braking. This is a safety issue for them too. People cannot react fast enough for a wild animal in the road unless they are going 45 mph or less. I suggest that in areas with lots of wild animals, especially around national parks like the Grand Tetons, that the speed limit of 45 mph or less be posted and HEAVILY enforced. We should do this for the people’s safety too, not just the wildlife.
6. In the many years that you've worked in habitat connectivity, what project stands out to you the most as an example of how to successfully reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions to protect wildlife and the humans driving through their fragmented habitats?
Projects that are collaborative, that have non-profit and public support to keep the community of people aware of the challenge from start to well past the “finish” of the wildlife crossing structures are important. I worked in Texas (https://www.wildlifeconnectivity.org/texas-reports) and asked TXDOT biologists what groups were on the outside demanding wildlife crossing structures, and those years ago, they couldn’t name anyone. That is changing. It really takes the people whose taxes pay the salaries of the DOT professionals, to show them it is important to make wildlife crossing structures, and not just “study” the problem. I love the work Montana DOT did about 10-20 years ago on US 93 both north and south of Missoula. We studied 19 wildlife crossing structures on that highway in the Bitterroot Valley (http://www.mdt.mt.gov/research/projects/env/us93_wildlife.shtml). The communities along there, and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes to the north all had a say in what they wanted the expanded highway to look like and to accommodate. Those projects were successful. However, they were not enough. Grizzly bear have been killed north of Missoula on this highway, because they are not using the underpasses. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribe just won $8 million from the Federal Highway Wildlife Crossing Pilot Program (2024) to install an overpass where grizzly need to cross US 93 on their lands. I think of this as a project that stands out, because the Tribe just kept up the research and effort to get wildlife crossing structures. Montana DOT has been hesitant to build more structures for various reasons, and the Tribe insisted that what was out there was not enough. I am happy there are avenues for funding that come directly from the Federal Highway Administration, because that takes a big financial strain off the DOT that are committed to doing something.
7. With all of the research you have completed related to wildlife movement and mitigation measures, what are some lessons you've learned along the way? What has surprised you the most in the world of wildlife movement?
Lessons learned. Well, this is a lesson for all of us – do not demonize people that don’t see things your way. I look to see what motivates people, what their objective is, how they approach things. Then I see how my needs for protecting wildlife movement can also satisfy their objectives. That’s why I start with crash data to find common ground. With the changing of the guard in many agencies as baby boomers retire, I think it is imperative that people with knowledge of types of wildlife crossing structures different species will use, and how different approaches work or do not work stay involved and teach the up and coming champions for wildlife in transportation and wildlife agencies.
What has surprised me most in the world of wildlife movement is how much wildlife learn from each other, among species. Elk and pronghorn have been hesitant to use crossing structures. But time and time again, in Utah, Colorado, and in Wyoming, we’ve seen mule deer lead individuals and herds of pronghorn and elk through and over crossing structures. I didn’t realize how much species interact out there before we placed cameras out there. I guess we could learn from them about working together.
Picture below is of mule deer leading elk over the US 160 Chimney Rock Overpass on the Southern Ute Indian Tribe land in Colorado.
8. What are some of the lessons you’ve learned in your work that have impacted you the most? What advice would you give someone starting out in road ecology work and wanting to make a difference in habitat connectivity?
I am living by this quote, “The measure of a person is what it takes to stop you.” Anyone in this world or in the world of conservation has to stick with their passion project at least 5 years. If you move on, get your predecessors to take it on. If I hadn’t stayed in Utah for 14 years, I could not have affected the change I did and I hope to continue to do from afar.
One of my favorite all time quotes is from Margaret Mead, “Never underestimate the power of a few individuals to change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.” I have found over the past 20 years that it takes less than 10 people, typically less than 6 people, one of whom has some purse string power, to make wildlife crossing structures and other great wildlife mitigation along roads happen. It takes the hearts and minds of people inside and outside agencies to make these changes.
Dr. Patricia Cramer is the founder of The Wildlife Connectivity Institute. To learn more about her work, please visit the link below: