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Design for Conservation

Design for Conservation


Wildlife Crossing

Kelly, A.S., Connette, G., Helsingen, H., and Paing Soe. (2016). Wildlife Crossing: Locating species' movement corridors in Tanintharyi. Worldwide Fund for Nature (Myanmar). 49pp.

This report is a collaboration between landscape designers, policy strategists, and species biologists from HKU, Smithsonian, WWF, FFI, and WCS. The importance of the study is that it takes abstract regional models from conservation biology developed over the past decade and applies them to site-specific conditions for the design of wildlife crossings where data is extremely limited. A set of principles was developed to reduce the abstraction and potential error in regional models of animal movement rate (proxied by electric circuit theory) and is potentially a breakthrough in multi-species modeling using these techniques, still critiqued as impractical only a year ago. The entire process is automated and outputs an optimized set of potential wildlife crossings as segments, rather than points, to allow flexibility in decision-making during road design and alignment due to costing and local landscape conditions.

The Dawei Road Link, a planned 138-kilometer highway linking Bangkok to a 260-square-kilometer SEZ in Myanmar, bisects regional ecological corridors. This map shows the design team’s intervention sites used to convey landscape impacts, predict wildlife crossings, and test design strategies, 2016.
The Dawei Road Link, a planned 138-kilometer highway linking Bangkok to a 260-square-kilometer SEZ in Myanmar, bisects regional ecological corridors. This map shows the design team’s intervention sites used to convey landscape impacts, predict wildlife crossings, and test design strategies, 2016.

Posted by: (Design for Conservation)