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
Awards
- Finalist in the 2012 Peterborough Business Excellence Awards for the Environmental Practices Award.
- Finalist in the 2012 Earth Day Canada Hometown Heroes Award for Small Business Award.
- Part of finalist team in the ARC International Wildlife Crossing Infrastructure Design Competition. The five finalists were chosen from 36 team submissions from nine countries, representing over 100 firms worldwide, and gathered in Washington to present their projects.
Past and current projects include:
- Ontario's first and second ACO wildlife tunnels, installed at Cyprus Lake Road in November 2011, and Long Point Causeway on November 2012 (watch video)
- Pre-mitigation monitoring of turtle road mortality on Highway 7 between Havelock and Kaladar
- Completion of 1.5 years of monitoring of mitigation measures on Highway 69, Sudbury, Ontario including 1 wildlife overpass, 1 wildlife underpass, 3 creek-bridge pathways, 20 km fencing, and 26 one-way gates
- Completion of pre monitoring on measuring the effectiveness of fencing and 23 new underpasses on Highway 93 South, Montana
- Validation of a landscape-based, GIS roadkill predictive model for amphibians and reptiles in Southern Ontario with the Ontario Road Ecology Group at the Royal Ontario Museum
- Application of landscape-based model to determine if Turtle Crossing Signs are in the right place
Eco-Kare strives to keep up to date with the international road ecology community and road safety engineers and recently returned from the Infra Eco Network Europe conference in Berlin, Germany:
- K.E. Gunson, F.W. Schueler. Informed placement of wildlife mitigation measures: using turtle crossing signs as a case study in Ontario. 2012 Infra Eco Network Europe Bi-annual conference. Berlin, Germany. October, 2012.
Eco-Kare specializes in applying road ecology research to consulting services with three new peer-reviewed papers in 2012:
- K.E. Gunson, F.W. Schueler, 2012. Effective placement of road mitigation using lessons learned from turtle crossing signs in Ontario. Ecological Restoration 30:329-334.
- T.A. Langen, K. E. Gunson, C. Scheiner, and J.T. Boulerice, 2012. Road mortality in freshwater turtles: identifying causes of spatial patterns to optimize road planning and mitigation. Biodiversity and Conservation 21:3017-3034.
- K.E. Gunson, D. Ireland, F.W. Schueler, 2012. A tool to prioritize high-risk road mortality locations for wetland-forest herpetofauna in southern Ontario, Canada. NorthWestern Journal of Zoology 8:409-413