This is a very exciting upcoming competition addressing the issue of wildlife crossings. (See the right hand column on this blog for many links on the issue.) The competition website by the ARC states the following about the competition.
ARC will engage the best and most innovative international, interdisciplinary design teams—comprised of landscape architects, architects, engineers, ecologists, and other experts—to create the next generation of wildlife crossing structures for North America’s roadways. This competition seeks specifically from its entries, innovation in feasible, buildable context-sensitive and compelling design solutions for safe, efficient, cost-effective, and ecologically responsive wildlife crossings. In doing so, it hopes to raise international awareness of a need to better reconcile the construction and maintenance of road networks with wildlife movement.
There are a number of successful wildlife crossings in North America, some large, some small, some over and some under. The Banff wildlife crossings have been one of the most thoroughly documented and in Florida they have tried to save their dwindling panther population with a series of crossings. Some of these projects can simply be installing or modifying a culvert for small animals such as amphibians and small mammals, or large, multi-million dollar overpasses for bears and elk such as with Banff.
This is a fascinating subject for me, I spent one studio at school designing a wildlife crossing and learned a lot about the road-wildlife conflict and the creative solutions to address it. This competition will be very interesting to watch and see what the teams come up with.
I think you can name it as Zebra Crossing for animals only!….MATTS