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Ramnagar Forest Division in Nainital district, Uttarakhand, recently built its first eco-bridge for reptiles and smaller mammals
Eco-bridges
- Eco-ducts or eco-bridges aim to enhance wildlife connectivity that can be disrupted because of highways or logging.
- A wildlife corridor is a link of wildlife habitat, generally made up from native vegetation, which joins two or more larger areas of similar wildlife habitat.
- Wildlife corridors play a very important role in maintaining connections between animal and plant populations that would otherwise be isolated and therefore at greater risk of local extinction.
Types
Underpass tunnels, viaducts, and overpasses (mainly for large or herd-type animals); amphibian tunnels; fish ladders; Canopy bridge (especially for monkeys and squirrels), tunnels and culverts (for small mammals such as otters, hedgehogs, and badgers); green roofs (for butterflies and birds).
Why Do We Need Eco-Bridges?
- Human activity and intervention in our natural environment leave fragmented patches of intact or relatively intact ecosystems whose ties with others are severed.
- If human activities continue in the area, those islands of biodiversity become even smaller and grow further apart putting the ecosystems at risk.
- This ultimately leads to a breakdown in the various ecological processes such as species migration, recycling of nutrients, pollination of plants and other natural functions required for ecosystem health.
- As a result, the habitat will suffer severe biodiversity decline and local extinction of sensitive species.
Challenges
- The challenging aspects of wildlife corridors are the lack of funding because of the lack of research into the actual benefits of these corridors.
- As many wildlife corridors intersect busy roads or places where a lot of humans are, many species shy away from the area.
- Corridors also need to be built very wide to maintain the wilderness effect, but this land is very hard to get approved for usage as a wildlife corridor in some cases.
- They also must maintain the same habitat as the areas the animals call home, or crossing will seem unnatural to the animals using the corridor.
Source: Indian Express
