Wildlife movement across, under, and adjacent to highway rights-of-way and crossing structures is of critical concern for environmental protection, regulatory, and public safety reasons. Using low-powered/self-powered camera networks communicating via wireless, wired, or cell technologies with Web-informatics could provide information for short-term project and mitigation needs and long-term monitoring needs. The goal of this research is to develop the technology to support the evolution of wildlife monitoring associated with transportation corridors from manually maintained cameras to wired and wireless camera systems employing a variety of communication technologies. Further, these systems are fully integrated and usable with Web-informatics systems, making data collection and sharing more consistent and easier. This new approach is both feasible and attractive to transportation planning and environmental assessment because it makes the cost and benefits of these systems more predictable and the outputs more continuous. The proposed system also resembles current traffic flow monitoring systems, which are increasingly familiar to transportation staff and the public. Finally, the system will reduce risk to staff accessing wildlife cameras from the right-of-way because camera system maintenance will be occasional.

Goals:

• To develop low-powered sensor systems that accelerate project delivery and environmental assessment, and that support decisions.
• To increase the prevalence of unstaffed sensor technologies.
• To reduce hazards and costs associated with field monitoring.

• Exploratory Advanced Research

• FY 2002-2022 / Exploratory Advanced Research
• FY 2002-2022 / Infrastructure / Transportation Performance Management, Asset Management
• FY 2002-2022 / Planning, Environment, and Realty / Accelerating Project Delivery
• FY 2002-2022 / Safety / Safety Data and Analysis