Wildlife passages win awards
Bridges, culverts allow safe routes around city
A new 30-metre bridge built for moose and other animals near Big Lake is one of a dozen passages recently created to help wildlife move between natural areas in the city.
At least 14 more smaller bridges and specialized culverts are in the works and city officials are now getting recognition for finding an effective approach to a complex ecological problem.
Edmonton won awards from the Canadian Association of Municipal Administrators and Alberta Emerald Foundation this week.
Construction crews are still planting trees and other vegetation around the 30-metre bridge over the moose corridor just south of Big Lake, a natural area popular with a variety of ungulates, small animals and birds in northwest Edmonton.
The bridge is a first for the city and one of the biggest successes of the new wildlife passage program.
“Outside the mountain parks, Banff and Jasper, I don’t know of a single other similar structure that has been built solely for the purpose of wildlife and maintaining connectivity in any other urban municipality,” said Catherine Shier, principal ecological planner for the city.
The underpass connects two stands of trees along a creek south of Big Lake, where the passage otherwise would be cut off by 215th Street, also known as Winterburn Road.
The bridge is being built several years before houses in the new subdivision so that the trees and shrubs have time to grow and the animals grow accustomed to the new passage.
The structure includes trees that will shelter the animals and encourage birds to fly over the traffic to cross the road.
The underpass is designed to accommodate everything from frogs to rabbits to deer, moose and coyotes.
Several local volunteers will set up motion-triggered cameras to monitor the success of the underpass after it’s finished, Shier said.
Edmonton’s other wildlife passages are smaller, bridges that have been built to accommodate small mammals or box-shaped culverts to give space for small creatures to pass through without getting their feet wet.
In one case, the passage was as simple as creating gently sloped curbs beside a road so salamanders and frogs could cross from a wetland to the forested area they use during the winter.
The program had a slow start, said Grant Pearsell, director of parks and biodiversity.
The city’s planners, ecologists and engineers had a hard time communicating as each science brings its own language and expectations.
For him, this week’s award is as much about learning to bridge that gap as it is about the passages themselves.
The turning point came in 2009, when his department hired an engineer to write a set of guidelines for engineers, detailing exactly what parameters are needed to deal with each of 11 classes of wildlife.
“(That document) just started to make things work a lot easier,” said Pearsell.
Now developers deal with wildlife networks at the same time as they plan drainage and transportation networks in new communities. “It gives everyone the chance to incorporate this into the design.”