Wildlife Protection

Keeping It Simple: Easy Ways to Help Wildlife Along Roads

Innovative revegetation methods create wildlife habitat and "natural" roadside

Along Yellowstone National Park's East Entrance Road, a resourceful combination of topsoil and on-site organic material has restored native vegetation, ground cover, a natural setting, and roadside habitats for birds and small mammals. When biologists from the Western Federal Lands Division of the Federal Highway Administration, in partnership with the National Park Service, revegetated the disturbed slopes along Yellowstone National Park's East Entrance Road, they didn't lose scarce topsoil to construction "cut and fill," and they didn't have to truck in soil supplements. They accomplished the revegetation by saving the construction-site topsoil, storing it in mounds just beyond construction limits, and later combining it with forest duff, boulders, and tree snags and trimmings to spread on the road's roughened slopes.

--Apr 25, 2003

Terri Thomas, (360) 619-7967 or terri.thomas@fhwa.dot.gov

Photo by Allan Stockman, Western Federal Lands Highway Division

Roadside landscape with diverse native vegetation, Yellowstone National Park

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Along Roads - Wyoming