Conservationists and public agencies work toward reopening blocked wildlife corridors.

Even if they make it across intact, wandering fauna face obstacles navigating around Monterey County. In an effort to help them out, local nonprofits and public agencies are collaborating to identify and protect wildlife corridors, which boost species’ chances for survival by connecting habitats fragmented by roads, farms and developments.

“Without wildlife corridors, our conservation areas are really doomed,” says Grey Hayes of the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve (ESNERR). “As habitats become isolated, patch by patch, wildlife species are driven toward extinction.”

Transportation planners, farmers and developers often unwittingly block the paths upon which generations of animals have come to rely. This interrupts predator-prey relationships and makes wildlife more vulnerable to fire, flood, diseases and inbreeding, which can lead to local extinction.

“The idea behind corridors is a connect-the-dots theory,” says Terry Palmisano, senior wildlife biologist with the California Department of Fish & Game. “We have all these patches that, left by themselves, don’t have a lot of value for wildlife. But when you link them together, these patches take on a greater value.”

Interest in wildlife corridors is growing in local conservationist circles. In January, the ESNERR’s Coastal Training Program brought scientists, scholars, consultants and planners together to discuss wildlife connectivity in one area of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

In June, another cross-section of professionals tackled the challenge of getting carnivores, ungulates, amphibians and reptiles safely across California highways. Meanwhile, a state bond measure recently allocated nearly $20 billion for transportation improvements, but many of the measures intended to improve motorist safety make road passage harder on wildlife. Fences, sound walls and rail lines may prevent animals from crossing at all, and concrete median barriers can trap them halfway across the road.

Protected wildlife crossings can take the form of specially designed culverts or land bridges. In Canada’s Banff National Park, a combination of underpasses, overpasses and strategic fencing have reduced roadkills by 80 percent and drastically cut the number of animal-vehicle collisions. Proposed wildlife overpasses on Washington’s I-90 and Colorado’s I-70 are gaining momentum, and transportation planners in Southern California have engineered several culverts for animal passage.

But statewide corridor planning has been slow in coming. Unlike Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, California lacks a habitat connectivity plan. Such a plan requires collaboration across departments and jurisdictions, so strategizing is tricky.

“Nobody’s job is to look at the large scale,” Hayes says. “We usually plan at the county level, and [Monterey County officials] have been caught up on all sorts of minutiae with the General Plan debate.”

Funding also presents a hurdle. Some state bonds and private grants are available for land acquisitions, but those aren’t tied to the nascent wildlife corridor effort.

Conservation advocates are backing Assembly Bill 828, which would require the Department of Fish & Game (DFG) and the state’s Wildlife Conservation Board to identify California’s most important wildlife corridors. Despite initial opposition from the California Association of Realtors, the bill passed the House and is now before the Senate.

But the DFG’s Palmisano worries that the bill’s passage might not do much unless it’s tied to cash. “We have a lot of mandates we’ve been given over the years by the Legislature without funding or personnel, and we’re struggling to keep up with them,” she says.