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Wildlife college students at Cal Poly College-Humboldt are coordinating with a number of California companies on a brand new examine that may examiine whether or not lighted highway indicators scale back car collisions with Roosevelt elk in Humboldt and Del Norte counties. The twist? The highway indicators will solely flash their shiny lights when elk are literally close to or on the freeway.
One specific stretch of California’s well-known Freeway 101, close to Orick and Stone Lagoon, has turn out to be particularly problematic for native Roosevelt elk herds and drivers alike. The freeway cuts by migratory corridors and core habitat for the state’s 1,000-plus Roosevelt elk. In consequence, the California Division of Fish and Wildlife and the California Division of Transportation have each designated this specific stretch of Freeway 101 as an space of concern for wildlife collisions, CPUH says. No less than three Roosevelt elk have died from collisions thus far this 12 months within the space and 5 died the 12 months prior, SFGate stories. These accidents pushed researchers and state officers to design a brand new alert system—one which solely signaled drivers when animals have been really on the highway forward of them.
Utilizing grant funding from Caltrans’ Division of Analysis, Innovation, and System Data, CPUH wildlife professor Micaela Szykman Gunther and her undergraduate and graduate college students are working with the state companies to develop wildlife radio collars that set off highway indicators to gentle up.
College students will seize and match Roosevelt elk from the close by herds with the specialised radio collars. Transmitters on the collars will talk with a collection of 20 antennas mounted on roadside posts, unfold 300 toes aside alongside Freeway 101. If an elk comes inside 150 toes of one of many receivers, it’ll sign a lighted highway signal to flash. When elk aren’t near the highway, the signal will stay unlit.
“Everybody has seen these indicators like ‘deer crossing,’ however you ignore them,” Gunther advised SFGate. “If an indication is flashing that there’s a hazard and risk on the highway, I feel that’s going to work.”
Roosevelt elk are one among three elk subspecies within the Golden State. Their our bodies are typically larger than the state’s Rocky Mountain elk, regardless of the Rocky Mountain elk’s bigger antlers. Roosevelt elk additionally dwarf Tule elk in each physique mass and antler measurement. Their giant our bodies make for far more harmful car collisions than one with the common whitetail deer. However large-wildlife collisions basically are a difficulty for California; extra than8,000 large-animal car collisions occurred statewide over a 6-year interval, leading to over 1,500 human accidents and 24 fatalities, California Freeway Patrol advised Landline.
Learn Subsequent: Car Collisions with Wildlife Price California $1 Billion within the Final 5 Years
The analysis workforce is presently accumulating information on elk actions and highway crossings, and so they presently goal to have the Digital Detection System in place and operational by the summer season of 2024. If it really works nicely, CDFW and Caltrans hope it may be helpful for different wildlife species in different components of the state, too, the CPUH press launch says.
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