Highway 3: Transportation Mitigation for Wildlife and Connectivity

The Highway 3 transportation corridor, including land use and development adjacent to the highway, has been identified as a major challenge to maintaining wildlife connectivity at the northern edge of the Crown of the Continent ecosystem. Highway 3 is a two-lane, east–west highway supporting 6,000 to 9,000 vehicles per day traveling over the Continental Divide at Crowsnest Pass in the southern Canadian Rockies. The current rate of wildlife–vehicle collisions involving large mammals along Highway 3 has raised concerns among agencies and the public regarding motorist safety. Although highway segments experiencing a high number of these collisions are predominantly found to involve deer, collisions also occur with less common species such as elk, moose, bighorn sheep, grizzly bear, wolf, lynx, bobcat and cougar. The syntheses, field assessments and recommendations described in this report reflect the best available understanding and options for direct mitigation of highway impacts to local populations of large terrestrial wildlife. Although conservation measures at regional and landscape scales are critical in maintaining wildlife population connectivity, the focus of this report is at the finest scale necessary to address Highway 3 impacts on terrestrial wildlife—that of site-specific mitigation of the highway itself.