Colorado officials on Tuesday were proud to announce the completion of the I-25 Greenland wildlife overpass in Douglas County. Spanning six lanes of busy interstate, the bridge structure is 209 feet long by 200 feet wide, with a surface area of nearly an acre, making it the largest wildlife crossing ever built in North America and one of the largest in the world.
After nine years of planning and construction, crews put the finishing touches on the structure earlier this month by covering the surface with dirt and planting seeds. Douglas County Commissioner George Teal called its completion a “tremendous milestone” in safeguarding wildlife habitat and protecting public safety.
The bridge structure lies in a heavily trafficked stretch of road near Larkspur, which is around the midway point between Denver and Colorado Springs, the two most populous cities in the state. (Around 100,000 vehicles travel the stretch on a daily basis.) This part of the Front Range is also an important migration corridor for big game.
In other words, a recipe for roadkill. According to the Colorado Department of Transportation, there has been an average of one wildlife-vehicle collision per day in the area during the spring and fall seasons. CDOT now expects the new crossing to reduce those crashes by around 90 percent. This aligns with past research in Banff National Park, where a series of wildlife crossings have helped reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions by 80 percent — or 96 percent for just elk and deer.
“Colorado Parks and Wildlife is excited for Colorado’s wildlife to utilize this overpass,” CPW area wildlife manager Matt Martinez said in a news release Tuesday. “We look forward to deer, elk, bears, mountain lions and many other species safely crossing I-25, once a major barrier to migration and wildlife movements.”
Read Next: The Unexpected Bright Side of Roadkill (and What It Means for Big Game)
CDOT says the crossing was designed with elk and pronghorn in mind. These and other species (like mule deer) prefer wide open overpasses — as opposed to the long and narrow underpasses preferred by mountain lions and black bears.
Because of the unseasonably warm weather that the Front Range has experienced so far this winter, CPW officials say big-game animals haven’t started using the crossing yet. But they expect that to change when snow starts pushing critters down from the high country.
Officials say the roughly $15-million project was completed ahead of schedule and on budget. Most of this funding came from a federal grant through the Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program that was established during the Biden Administration.
Read the full article here
