Where to implement a wildlife crossing in Fredon, NJ

This study will investigate the best place to implement a wildlife crossing in Fredon Township, New Jersey. Wildlife crossings help animals move through the landscape to find food and other necessities. Our wildlife is in jeopardy due to an increase in urbanization and climate change. Wildlife crossings not only help protect wildlife and promote ecological diversity but also help prevent road collisions on roadways. CHANJ (Connecting Habitat Across NJ) is an effort to connect habitats across NJ to make landscapes and roadways easier for wildlife to cross and create habitat connectivity. The CHANJ Guidance document explains the rationale behind the CHANJ project and guides my research. The tools that CHANJ provides inform land managers, conservation groups, transportation planners, and the general public about the habitat connectivity issue. There are important areas that the CHANJ web viewer shows, such as core habitats and corridors. Core habitats are areas where the habitat cover meets the needs of most wildlife. Corridors are continuous strips of land that represent the most efficient route between cores. The web viewer for CHANJ is preprogrammed with layers to make it easier to identify the best places to implement the project. For fieldwork, roadkill surveys helped quantify how much roadkill is occurring on certain stretches of roadway. A report of data was submitted to the NJ wildlife tracker application, which is a citizen science program. Expected results are that the best place to implement a wildlife crossing would be over a very busy roadway and where more roadkill is present.