Assessment of Wildlife-Transportation Impacts and Prioritization of Potential Migration Efforts in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

WTI analyzed various data sets to identify wildlife-transportation conflict areas in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and outlined strategies to incorporate transportation mitigation for reducing AVCs, improving habitat connectivity, and increasing driver safety while protecting long-term ecological integrity.

The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) is one of the last places in temperate North America with large tracts of relatively undisturbed lands that provide habitat for grizzly and black bears, wolves, cougars, wolverine, moose, elk, bison, deer, pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep and many other northern Rocky Mountain wildlife species. Roads throughout the GYE fragment these quality habitats, result in costly AVCs, and can limit animal movements across the landscape when traffic volumes are high. As traffic volumes continue to increase and development continues to sprawl across the landscape, fragmentation and animal-vehicle collisions will continue to increase. The Greater Yellowstone Coalition (GYC) has contracted the Western Transportation Institute (WTI) at Montana State University and the American Wildlands (AW) Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Lab to analyze animal-vehicle collision data from the GYE. Spatial analyses will be conducted by American Wildlands, while WTI will analyze the combination of AVC data, habitat connectivity areas, and upcoming transportation projects to identify wildlife-transportation conflict areas and strategies to incorporate mitigation for habitat connectivity for wildlife, reducing AVCs, and to increase driver safety in the GYE.