Helping Wildlife Move

Volunteers Needed to do Streamcrossing Surveys

We are surveying streamcrossings (bridges and culverts) around the county in an effort to make every major road repair an opportunity to improve ecosystem and habitat connectivity to help wildlife cross roads safely. If you would like to spend some time out measuring, rating, and photographing places where brooks, streams, and rivers cross under roads, please, let us know.

As roads are repaired, all crossings must be "suitably culverted, bridged, or otherwise designed to withstand and to prevent the restriction of high flows, and so as not to obstruct the movement of aquatic life indigenous to the waterbody" in order to receive a Category 1 (non-reporting) Army Corps of Engineers permit. What this jargon means - to get the easy permit, your crossing must allow highwater flows and aquatic wildlife to pass easily under the road.

BEAT believes that to meet the standard above, the crossing must meet the General or Optimum Crossing Standards of the Massachusetts River and Stream Crossing Standards (pdf 111KB).

Additionally, we would like to see provisions made for terrestrial wildlife appropriate to the wildlife in the area, the size (volume of cars) of the road, and the topography. Often it appears to us that putting in a larger crossing just makes obvious sense to keep deer or other animals off the road.

Thank you to the TransWild Alliance and others who made it possible for BEAT to attend the International Conference on Ecology and Transportation. It was a very informative week!!

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License Plates Fund BEAT's Effort to Make Roads More Environmentally Friendly

BEAT received a financial boost for our work to ensure that every major road repair is an opportunity to help connect wildlife habitat and ecosystems. BEAT received $21,819 from the Massachusetts Environmental Trust.

According to Trust Director Dorrie Pizzella, the Trust will provide over $500,000 in grants to more than 30 organizations this year, thanks to motorists who choose to purchase one of the Trusts’ three special license plates: the Right Whale & Roseate Terns, the Leaping Brook Trout, or the Blackstone Valley Mill. “You purchase a plate from the Registry of Motor Vehicles and half the registry fee is donated to the Trust to fund water-focused environmental education and protection programs,” said Pizzella.

“Every major road repair is an opportunity to make that road more friendly to wildlife,” says Jane Winn, Executive Director of BEAT. “We are grateful to the Trust for supporting our work.”

Our transportation network has fragmented wildlife habitat resulting in hot spots of road kill – from deer and bear to turtles and frogs. In many places, the culverts that carry water under our roads won’t even allow fish to swim upstream. BEAT will be trying to identify roads that may undergo major repair in the coming years, survey the existing bridges and culverts to see if they adequately allow fish and wildlife to cross under the road, and map the problem crossings. BEAT hopes to identify places in need of better culverts early enough that they can be incorporated without adding significant expense – or early enough that different funds may be accessed to provide for better crossings.

When you purchase a new car or renew your registration with the Registry of Motor Vehicles, you can help preserve environmental education, conservation, or public awareness efforts. The plates cost $76, which includes a $40 tax deductible donation to the Trust. There is a renewal fee of $81 every two years. Visit your local Registry or order a plate online at www.mass.gov/rmv; or log onto www.MassEnvironmentalTrust.org where you can learn more about the Trust, the programs it supports, and the specialty license plate offerings.

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Helping Wildlife Cross the Road

BEAT has received grants from the TransWild Alliance, Berkshire Environmental Endowment, and the Massachusetts Environmental Trust to help wildlife cross the road.

Our project started small - beginning to survey streamcrossings (bridges and culverts) on roads likely to undergo major repair in the near future. But our vision is expanding. We are working with the River and Stream Continuity Partnership and lots of volunteers to try to survey all the streamcrossings in Berkshire County. With this information, we will be able to prioritize action on the crossings that would make the biggest difference to wildlife habitat connections. And we will be able to work with road planners at all levels to point out which crossings need attention when roads are repaired.

In addition to helping wildlife cross the road, BEAT is involved with a number of partnerships helping wildlife cope with climate change by maintaining and enhancing the connections among our already protected landscapes.

BEAT is a member of the Wildlands and Woodlands Partnership with a vision to protect half the land in Massachusetts - 2.5 million acres - from development. Some of this land would be wildland reserves embedded within working woodlands managed for multiple goods and services.

Wildlife needs "Freedom to Roam" - In September 2009, Jane Winn, Executive Director of BEAT, attended the International Conference on Ecology and Transportation (ICOET) thanks to very generous support from the TransWild Alliance. Ten TransWild Alliance members shared two hotel rooms. It was cozy, but fun. The Keynote Speaker at ICOET was Rick Ridgeway, Board Chair of Freedom to Roam and Patagonia’s Vice President of Environmental Initiatives and Special Media Projects. He gave a great presentation. A similar presentation is on Freedom to Roam's website. One of the evenings, we had a TransWild meeting which Rick attended. It was really fun to hear what each organization was doing and have Rick get a feel for all of our different projects.

Connecting Landscapes - In October, Jane will be attending a roundtable on Connetctivity and Land Use Planning organized by Two Countries One Forest, Wildlife Conservation Society, The Nature Conservancy and Wildlands Network.

More to come.

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July 2008 - Better Roads for Wildlife in the Berkshires

Major road planning in Berkshire County just became a little more wildlife friendly! Wildlife habitat impacts will now be considered in ranking all major highway projects, something BEAT has been pushing for as a member of the Berkshire County Transportation Advisory Committee (TAC).

A couple of years ago, BEAT began videotaping the Berkshire Metropolitan Planning Organization (BMPO), which approves all the major road projects in the county. One of BEAT’s major issues of concern is the impact of the transportation network on wildlife and ecosystems. We had been told by Defenders of Wildlife Habitat and Highways program that the BMPO was the most likely place to be able to have an impact. However, road planning often takes10 years, so we didn't think BEAT would have much impact for quite a while.

Last year BEAT was invited to join the Transportation Advisory Committee (TAC) to the BMPO. This group is supposed to represent diverse interests and provide more public input on transportation issues. [So if you have environmental issues that you would like represented please contact Jane and let her know.]

The two issues that BEAT repeatedly raises are:

bicycling as transportation - not the bike path - all roads when they received state or federal money should be required to accommodate bicycles.
decreasing the impact on roads on the surrounding ecosystem.

On this second point we have scored two major victories -

Berkshire Regional Planning Commission's GIS (Geographical Information Systems – mapping) and transportation staff are working very hard to try to quantify ecosystem impacts. BEAT helped arrange a presentation by Scott Jackson from UMass on the Conservation Assessment and Prioritization System for the BRPC staff. This is a work in progress, but real consideration is being given to wildlife habitat and state-listed species habitat.
Mass Highway District 1 (our district of Mass Highway) and the BMPO have new Transportation Improvement Project evaluation criteria. These criteria, with numerical values attached, are used to rank various road projects. These new criteria (look at the right most column) include improved stormwater assessments and WILDLIFE HABITAT ASSESSMENT!

Thank you to Alison Church, Transportation Planner at Berkshire Regional Planning Commission (BRPC) and Peter Frieri at Mass Highway for helping to make these changes possible. Peter also pointed out that when BRPC and Mass Highway work with the towns, it gives them a chance to get the town Departments of Public Works to use these same criteria, so we expect this to have broad reach in improving road projects!

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What is Road Ecology

Before BEAT existed, our current Executive Director, Jane Winn, attended a talk by Richard TT Forman, professor of Landscape Ecology at Harvard. Dr. Forman's talk about "Road Ecology" was so inspiring that Jane immediately bought his book titled "Road Ecology: Science and Solutions" and when a conference sprang up - the First Northeastern Transportation and Wildlife Conference in 2004- she immediately registered to attend, and she has attended this biennial conference ever since, encouraging Massachusetts transportation planners to attend as well (not with great success so far).

So, what is Road Ecology? To quote from page 7 of the book with that same name:

A road is an open way for the passage of vehicles, and ecology is the study of interactions between organisms and the environment. Therefore, the combination describes the essence of road ecology, namely the interaction of organisms and the environment linked to roads and vehicles. More broadly, traffic flows on an infrastructure of roads and related facilities form a road system. Thus road ecology explores and addresses the relationship between the natural environment and the road system.

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