Road Ecology: A New Way to Look at “Green”

One of the many concerns today is the built environment’s impact on the natural environment, and with the talk of GHGs and humans’ impact on the planet, this connection is becoming more and more important each day. A major cause of animal habitat fragmentation is human development, which invariably involves the building of roads for automobiles. Habitat fragmentation is the breaking up of a species’ natural habitat. When land is cleared for development, houses and shopping centers are built, and people move into a previously untouched area, the ecosystem is disturbed. Part of this ecosystem involves the living space of a variety of plants and animals, and human development carves up this habitat, forcing species to adapt or die off. Roads are one specific way human development affects the surrounding ecosystem; they create artificial barriers and separations in species’ habitats.

What can be done to help restore the habitat of plants and animals? The newly-emerging field of road ecology may well have an answer. By designing and altering roads with an awareness of their impact, designers and engineers can attempt to mitigate the negative effects of roadways on the ecological landscape. Such green design involves, for example, creating tunnels for salamanders to cross a road to a breeding pond on the other side in order to procreate. Although such solutions do not counteract all impacts of roadway development, they can mitigate some of the issues, such as species separation. It is a positive step toward creating a landscape where human development is better integrated into the natural environment.

To read more about this topic, check out The New York Times article “Thinking Anew About a Migratory Barrier: Roads,” by Jim Robbins, published October 13, 2008.