EXPLORE WILD HOPE

Increasingly, wildlife migratory routes are blocked by human-made obstacles like highways, cities, and dams. Wildlife corridors seek to connect as much land and water as possible to give animals the freedom to roam and maintain healthy, genetically diverse populations. 

Brazil has over a million miles of roads, and Fernanda Abra has devoted herself to making them less dangerous to local wildlife and biodiversity.

Just like humans, wild animals often need to cross busy roads as they roam. But unlike us, they can’t rely on stoplights and crosswalks. That’s where wildlife crossings come in. 

Fernanda Abra is a biologist with a Ph.D. in Applied Ecology and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Conservation and Sustainability Center.

The Brazilian treetops are full of creatures like monkeys and sloths living high above a forest floor segmented by dangerous roadways. The Via Fauna team is installing arboreal crossings made of cheap, local materials to reconnect the forest canopy — and allow these creatures to once again move freely throughout their landscape.

Brazil has more biodiversity than any other nation on Earth, but it also has more than a million miles of roads. Biologist Fernanda Alba and her team are establishing underpasses across the country that allow big terrestrial animals — to date, the team has documented over 40,000 safe wildlife crossings.

In order to scale up reforestation, Mauricio Ruiz and his organization ITPA have partnered with the drone fleet at MORFO. Each drone can plant up to 50 hectares of forest per day, which is 50 times faster than planting by hand.

A group in Maui has restored a safe haven for endangered seabirds to come home and nest: it’s completely fenced-off from predators and restored with native plants, but the birds still need some convincing! The team is using decoy “neighbors” and audio recordings of bird calls to make the seabirds feel at home — and at long last, the colony is growing!

A common conservation technique on islands is the creation of predator-free zones to exclude invasive species, from mice to feral pigs, from recovering habitats.

Engineer Alistair Law explains his idea for a Vertical Meadow, and the way they bring food and habitat to a range of wildlife within the city.