New Mexico's state-wide connectivity conservation initiative
A pair of Mexican spotted owls in the Sacramento Mountains, New Mexico.
Individual animals and wildlife populations need to move across the landscape to follow seasonal food sources or disperse from their natal area, and human-created barriers pose a threat to those movements. Roads in particular fragment habitat and may prevent animals from meeting their nutritional and life history requirements. Wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVCs) not only present a well-documented risk to the safety of the traveling public; they can represent a significant cause of mortality in some animal species. In 2019, New Mexico took action to help prioritize and maintain wildlife habitat linkages with the signing of the New Mexico Wildlife Corridors Act (the Act).
This legislation mandated the development of a Wildlife Corridors Action Plan providing comprehensive guidance to the New Mexico Department of Transportation and the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish to identify, prioritize, and maintain important areas for wildlife movement. The approach to developing the Action Plan was science-driven and two-pronged, with a focus on identifying (1) the top wildlife-vehicle collisions hotpots in the state, representing the areas of greatest concern in terms of public safety, and (2) the top wildlife corridors intersecting high-traffic volume roads, representing conflict areas that are a mitigation priority for helping individual animals and wildlife populations for moving across the landscape.
The Wildlife Corridors Act identifies by name six large focal species, all mammals, whose movements across the landscape are disrupted by roads and road traffic while at the same time posing a threat to the traveling public. These six large mammals are the mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), elk (Cervus canadensis), pronghorn (Antilocapra americana), bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis), black bear (Ursus americanus), and cougar (Puma concolor) (also known as a mountain lion or puma). They represent the main focus of all the analyses and modeling in the Action Plan. Former Rocky Mountain Research Station research ecologist Sam Cushman was a co-leader of the New Mexico corridor team and conducted most of the analysis for the project. The work included using highway mortality and movement telemetry data for multiple species of wildlife to predict connectivity across the entire state using state-of-the-art methods Cushman developed over 20 years of work.