Long Point Improvement Project, fencing and ecopassages
First documented crossing on Ontario's overpass
ACO herp tunnel at Cyprus Lake Road
Overpass design for ARC competition
Presenting at the International Conference of Ecology and Transportation, 2009
Eco-Kare responds to an increasing demand for "green" transportation infrastructure
Past and current projects include:
- Ontario's first ACO wildlife tunnel, installed at Cyprus Lake Road on November 17th, 2011
- The Turtle Sign Inventory and Evaluation Project
- Monitoring of Large Mammal Mitigation Measures, Highway 69, 1 wildlife overpass, 1 wildlife underpass, 3 creek-bridge pathways, 20 km fencing, and one-way gates on Highway 69, Sudbury, Ontario
- Providing expertise where 3 wildlife ecopassages should be placed to maximize herpetofauna crossings for turtles, snakes and frogs in the Lark Erie Bay and marsh system surrounding the Long Point Causeway
- A review of proposed wildlife mitigation along the 407 east extension and recommendations for a multi-species and cost-effective mitigation strategy along the north south east link
- Finalist in ARC wildlife design competition -- Eco-Kare assisted a team of landscape architects and engineers in designing a wildlife overpass for West Vail Pass, Colorado (see design as pdf, 4.2mb)
- Pre-mitigation assessment (design and placement) for a herpetofaunal tunnel and associated fencing on Cyprus Lake Road, Bruce Peninsula National Park
- Assisting with measuring the effectiveness of fencing and 23 new underpasses on Highway 93, Montana
- Developing a landscape-based, GIS roadkill predictive model for amphibians and reptiles in Southern Ontario with the Ontario Road Ecology Group at the Toronto Zoo
Eco-Kare strives to keep up to date with the international road ecology community and road safety engineers and attended two international conferences in 2010 and 2011:
- K.M. Andrews, P. Nanjappa, S. Riley, and K.E. Gunson. 2011. Road Planning and Mitigation Design for Small Animals: Concepts and Applications. PUBLISHED IN PROCEEDINGS -- International Conference on Ecology and Transportation. Seattle, Washington. September, 2011
- K.E. Gunson, D. Ireland, F. Schueler. A regional mitigation blueprint for herpetofauna in Southern Ontario. 2010 Infra Eco Network Europe Bi-annual conference. Velence, Hungary. September, 2010. Paper submitted to Northwest Journal of Zoology.
Eco-Kare specializes in applying road ecology research to consulting services with two new peer-reviewed papers in 2011:
- D.C. Seburn and K.E. Gunson (in press). Has the Western Chorus Frog (Pseudacris triseriata) declined in western Ottawa. Canadian Field Naturalist.
- K.E. Gunson, G. Mountrakis, and L. Quackenbush. 2011. Spatial wildlife-vehicle collision models: a review of current work, and their application to transportation mitigation projects. Journal of Environmental Management 92:1074-1082. (read as pdf, 262K).