Fence line Surveys

Our fence line surveys were conducted as a way to ground truth high-conflict areas. To do this, team members walked the fence lines along US 89 looking for obvious game trails and other signs of high-density crossing.

Community Meetings

Community members with property adjacent to US 89 can play critical roles. Since its inception, Yellowstone Safe Passages has been convening community members to discuss opportunities and barriers to mitigating wildlife-vehicle conflicts. We invite community members to participate in developing lasting solutions and new partnerships between other locals and our agency partners. If you're a community member near the highway, please reach out to learn how you can support our work.

Highway Monitoring

Since Spring of 2020, the team at Yellowstone Safe Passages has been monitoring Highway 89 with ArcGIS software and via game-trail cameras set up at unique locations near the highway. One of our staff members performs weekly surveys of the entire stretch of highway between Livingston and Gardiner, collecting data points where animal carcasses are observed on the shoulder of the road.

Our citizen science program is a standardized data collection system being implemented by locals right here in the community! By recording both live and road-killed animals we can better understand how wildlife are moving along the road corridor and identify the highest risk areas for wildlife-vehicle collisions. This system, called ROaDS (The Roadkill Observation and Data System), provides critical information for decision-makers to most effectively develop solutions to make roads safer for people and wildlife!

Highway Assessment

Yellowstone Safe Passages partnered with the Center for Large Landscape Conservation and the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University to develop a fine-scale Wildlife and Transportation Assessment of US 89 from Livingston to Gardiner. This assessment was an interdisciplinary collaborative process that brought together a diversity of stakeholders, data, and information to ultimately identify the areas with the greatest need to address wildlife-vehicle conflict and develop recommendations for potential short- and long-term actions to make Highway 89 safer for people and wildlife.

Engineering Feasibility Study