As a wildlife connectivity researcher, Patricia Cramer has spent 20 years studying how animals get around in a manmade world. Through it all, one thing has stayed the same — influencing human behavior is by far the hardest part of the job.
“I like to say that I work with wildlife, because humans are so much more difficult to train,” Cramer said.
Cramer is the founder of the Wildlife Connectivity Institute, a research organization dedicated to reconnecting natural landscapes and educating the public on the benefits of wildlife crossings. It also partners with departments of transportation across the country to identify locations for animal-friendly infrastructure within their state.
She pores over wildlife collision data to understand where and why people get into accidents with animals. Looking at Missouri’s crash data, she was surprised to see how many deer are hit in the state’s urban cores.
“Missouri was amazing,” Cramer said. “I kept going back to the data and saying, ‘You've got to be kidding me.’ That in St. Louis and Kansas City you've got deer getting hit in town. And then we looked at the data, and it was like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ There's hundreds, if not thousands, of white-tailed deer in your cities. So that gets a little confusing.”
Earlier this year, Cramer worked with the Missouri Department of Transportation to publish a first-of-its-kind study for the state about wildlife collisions. In the past, Missouri’s efforts to keep animals off roads has been reactive rather than proactive, addressing problems only as they arose. But thanks to this study, that could soon change.
Officials hope this new research might act as a road map for MODOT’s future, charting a course they say could save millions of dollars and countless lives while bridging the gap between transportation and conservation.
Finding the ‘candy shops’
Moving across the landscape, wildlife tend to follow the routes of least resistance. They move along paths with wooded cover or access to fresh water, including along riparian zones, or where water and land meet, like streams, rivers or lakes. Another predictor of animal movement, according to Cramer, is access to food.
“Deer have candy shops across the landscape in Missouri. If there's somebody planting really good food, like corn or alfalfa, that's where they're going to get hit,” Cramer said. “So we talk about, ‘You need to fence to the next intersection to keep them from going straight across to that candy shop.’”
Unlike people, animals don’t tend to look both ways before crossing the street, especially if "candy shops" are involved. Of the more than 1 million animal-related car accidents that happen each year across the country, an average of 3,400 of those happen in Missouri, resulting in around four fatalities annually. On top of the immense personal toll car accidents take on those involved, they also rack up millions of dollars in emergency response and repair costs every year.
The Wildlife Crossing Pilot Program is an effort to stem that trend. It provides federal dollars to states and tribes to study and build wildlife friendly infrastructure, and in 2023, MODOT received a $320,000 grant from the program. The fruits of that grant came earlier this year in the form of the Missouri Statewide Wildlife Vehicle Collision Study.
The study collected wildlife crash information from a handful of Missouri agencies, organized them by location and plotted each crash on a map. Researchers then chunked Missouri’s roads into half-mile segments and scored them based on criteria like crash frequency, ecological importance and feasibility.
Caleb Knerr is a senior environmental specialist at MODOT, the project manager of the study and, according to Cramer, a champion for wildlife connectivity.
“They basically assigned a point value to each of those criteria and then aggregated those segments together to give the score for that priority segment and then that's what kind of formed that top 10,” Knerr said.
What rose to the top were 10 sites that would benefit the most from investment in wildlife crossings. Knerr said priority was given to already protected land, such as state parks and wildlife areas, so investments wouldn’t be made obsolete by future development.
Wildlife-friendly infrastructure often conjures visions of expensive, charismatic projects, like an animal bridge arching over a busy interstate, but that isn’t always the case. Studies show that installing animal fencing, cattle grates or escape ramps for wildlife could reduce collisions by more than 80%.
As a result, Knerr and his team prioritized upgrading already existing infrastructure in their hunt for possible crossings. The goal is to funnel animals under bridges and through culverts that are already there.
For some sites, that emphasis on retrofitting creates a surprising benefit-cost ratio. For example, a suggestion for one stretch of road along Pershing State Park in Linn County includes more than seven miles of fencing, gates and cattle guards that would cost about $1.7 million to install and maintain.
But over the crossing’s 50-year lifespan, that infrastructure would provide a monetary benefit of over $13 million, the study suggests. That number includes the price of every accident prevented as well as every animal left alive.
“So if every year you prevent three or five crashes, add that up over that 50-year service life, and then based on the severity of those crashes that are estimated in those areas, that's where you get that benefit of that mitigation,” Knerr said.
Where are the funds?
Identifying wildlife problem spots is one battle, but finding the money to fund them is another. To date, MODOT has received two awards from the Wildlife Crossing Pilot Program — one to fund the survey and another $900,000 grant for wildlife-friendly infrastructure projects along interstates 70 and 64. Knerr said those improvements are still in the early stages and need to be worked out with contractors.
While the current federal transportation funding bill expires in September, there are already signs the crossing program will live on in whatever comes next. In May, the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, chaired by U.S. Rep. Sam Graves, a Republican from Missouri, passed a $580 billion bill for ongoing transportation programs.
Within that bill is another five years of funding for the Wildlife Crossing Pilot Program and a couple of changes to how it functions. It proposes striking the word “pilot” from the program’s name, making it a more permanent fixture in future bills, as well as increasing the funding from $375 million to $400 million.
Andrew Rothman is the director of wildlife campaigns at Environment America, an organization that lobbies for environmental policy. Though his group and others are happy to see the increase in funding, they want to see even more support for this program in the future.
“The Wildlife Crossing Pilot Program has had two pots of funds distributed to about 35 projects in 29 states,” Rothman said. “But there were over 120 proposals, so there's a lot of demand for this.”
Having passed through committee, the transportation bill is currently waiting for a vote in the House. Rothman thinks, with midterms on the horizon, the bill might not be passed until early next year, after the next session of Congress starts.
Back in Missouri, none of the 10 road segments identified in the study have secured funding yet. However, the study marks a first step toward embedding animal movement into Missouri’s transportation planning.
And for Cramer, that’s a large first step, because the biggest wins are often the most incremental ones.
“The answer is a more holistic way of looking at the road and how it works within the landscape that was there before humans came and put a road in,” Cramer said. “The small changes that are not grabbing the headlines actually stay a lot longer than the changes made with big projects.”
With speed limits rising and interstates widening, it’s a dangerous time to be an animal on Missouri roads, but just like people, animals need to move. Many hope that reconnecting nature can make everyone, deer and driver, a little safer.
This story was first published by Missouri Business Alert, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
