Zero Roadkill: Amazon Canopy Bridges Secure 15,000 Wildlife Crossings
Zero roadkill as Amazon canopy bridges secure 15,000 crossings
I founded Projeto Reconecta to combat the deadly impact of highways on Brazilian wildlife. By installing low-cost rope bridges in Alta Floresta, we enabled 15,000 safe crossings for arboreal animals with zero roadkill over 15 months. These structures restore critical habitat connectivity, allowing species like the Alta Floresta titi monkey to disperse seeds and maintain genetic diversity. Our success has led Brazil's federal transport department to adopt this design as a national standard, and we are now expanding these life-saving tools to other biomes.
From our human perspective, roads mean connection and development. But for wildlife, they represent disconnection, barriers and a threat to survival.
- culi
Just wanna say, Monga Bay is an incredible publication that doesn't get enough attention. As someone who follows a lot of environmental news, they routinely cover important topics and do original journalism on stories I hear nowhere else. Their YouTube channel is full of extremely high quality videos that often get less than 2k views. I would highly recommend checking them out
https://www.youtube.com/@MongabayTV/videos
Here's a few of my favorites:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2rfy9HkzSs
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZEkt4Ph41M
- ynac
We just had our first bear crossing on a wildlife here in the Northwest.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/first-black-bear-u...
I know these things are more complicated than they seem at first, but whenever these stories surface, I immediately go to an idealistic childhood cartoon land where we have a prime directive that tells us to go forth(!) and watch out for each other!
- korijn
For one moment there I thought Amazon had done a good thing!
- aorth
This is really cool. We have them in Kenya too. https://www.colobusconservation.org/how-to-build-a-colobridg...
- dmix
I remember reading that back in the day North America used to have more trees and dense vegetation that squirrels rarely touched the ground since that was more dangerous for them, so they would use the trees like highways.
- inigyou
This is the first time Cloudflare has told me I am a bot and can't pass even if I click the box.
- jofzar
Huh I'm surprised these aren't more common around the world? We have these in Australia and they work great
- bitwize
Oh snap, I'm so Hackernews-brained I thought Amazon (company) had sponsored the construction of special animal-crossing bridges for San Francisco freeways.