Canopy bridges eliminate roadkill deaths, help endangered species

“A system of canopy bridges has apparently eliminated roadkill deaths for tree-dwelling animals along a road near Alta Floresta, a small town in the Brazilian Amazon. Brazil’s federal transport agency has made the design its recommended standard for highways,” notes The Doomslayer.

Mongabay reports:

On the road that leads to Alta Floresta, a small Amazon town in the far north of Mato Grosso state, deaths like the buffy-headed marmoset’s roadkill have not been recorded since 2024. That year, eight canopy bridges were installed, connecting fragmented forest patches. Camera trap footage revealed that, over 15 months, the aerial wildlife crossings enabled 15,000 safe crossings by arboreal animals — and not a single roadkill.

The bridges are part of a program involving Projeto Reconecta and the municipal government, along with local organizations and business owners who are eager to conserve the unique biodiversity of their town and promote ecotourism, but were alarmed by the growing number of wildlife-vehicle collisions.

Biologist Fernanda Abra, an associate researcher at the Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute in the U.S., and the founder of Reconecta, recalled that just hours before installing the first bridges in Alta Floresta, she found two Schneider’s marmosets dead. The species is endemic to the Brazilian Amazon and is threatened with extinction.

Brazil’s rarest parrots have made a comeback, escaping extinction.

Deforestation has slowed down in the Amazon.

Trees in the Amazon are getting bigger and more robust, due to higher levels of carbon dioxide.

Most of the world’s forests are expanding. Reforestation is offsetting the effects of global warming in parts of the U.S.

The amount of vegetation on the Earth has increased for each of the last 30 years.

The replacement of horses with automobiles restored New England’s forests, which had mostly disappeared by 1910, but now cover much of the region. Today, Vermont is 78% forested, but in 1910, it was mostly un-forested.

England has slightly more forest now than it did during the Black Death around 1350, even though England today has a dozen times as many people as it did back then. Scotland has many times more forest than it did in 1350. The United Kingdom as a whole has three times as much forest as it did at the start of the 20th century.

China’s forests have grown by about 234,000 square miles over the last 30 years, an area the size of Ukraine. The European Union has added an area the size of Cambodia to its woodlands.