Do wildlife crossing structures mitigate the barrier effect of roads on animal movement? A global assessment

摘要: The widespread impacts of roads on animal movement have led to the search for innovative mitigation tools. Wildlife crossing structures (tunnels or bridges) are a common approach; however, their effectiveness remains unclear beyond isolated case studies. We conduct an extensive literature review and synthesis to address the question: What is the evidence that wildlife crossing structures mitigate the barrier effect of roads on wildlife movement? In particular, we investigated whether wildlife crossing structures prevented an expected decline in cross‐road movement, restored movement to pre‐construction conditions, or improved movement relative to taking no action. In an analysis of 313 studies, only 14% evaluated whether wildlife crossing structures resulted in a change in animal movement across roads. We identified critical problems in existing studies, especially the lack of benchmarks (e.g. pre‐road, pre …