Wild Earth Society Incorporated

Eastern Wildway: We completed our third year of research at Gorges State Park, monitoring and assessing the effectiveness of four small wildlife road crossing culverts. We identified wildlife crossing opportunities within North Carolinas state parks and presented the opportunities to the High Country Rural Planning Association in Boone, the NC State Parks Symposium at Haw River State Park, and the NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. Building on our research efforts, we worked with NCDOT staff to create and edit three renderings of wildlife crossing designs for the I-40 corridor. We coordinated with partners to raise over $2.3 million in private funds to support a $25 million application from NCDOT to the Willdife Crossing Pilot Program for US-64 wildlife crossings, which was successful. We conducted an advertising campaign for the existing Prey for the Pack incentives program, with five qualifying landowners responding to these efforts, adding as much as 1,698 acres to the Prey for the Pack program. Our Future Forest Reimagined initiative launched a virtual workshop series for eight UNESCO Biosphere regions in Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Ontario, as well as partners in New York and Vermont, within or bordering the Northern Appalachian-Acadian-Wabanaki bioregion.

Pacific Wildway: We worked closely with partners to draft the Room to Roam Act (AB 1889), which requires local city and county governments in California to add "fish, wildlife, and habitat connectivity" considerations to the conservation element of their general plans. We finished collecting camera and roadkill data in Lassen and Sierra Counties for the second year of our US-395 road ecology study. We continued monitoring of South Lake Tahoe in partnership with Pathways for Wildlife and California Tahoe Conservancy, which has allowed us to preliminarily identify several important existing functional habitat linkages and movement barriers in the South Basin. We formed the Northern Sierra Wildlife Coalition in March 2024 to advocate for recreation planning that avoids, minimizes, and mitigates the ecological impacts of recreation and other uses on wildlife, wilderness values, and other natural resource values in the Northern Sierra. We worked closely with California agency staff to advance wildlife connectivity and support the implementation of AB 2344.

Other Programs: We were able to secure introduction of the first ever bipartisan and bicameral introduction of a wildlife corridors bill in Congress, the Wildlife Movement Through Partnerships Act. We helped 8 states and one Tribe secure roughly $74 million in grants from the $350 million Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program. In Mexico, we secured written commitments from four ranching families to participate in the Sonora EcoExists initiative to restore water sources on their properties, impacting 42,900 acres in the Cocspera Basin. We protected thick-billed parrots from wildfire alongside partners and the Tutuaca and Conoachi communities in Chihuahua. Informed by our advocacy for land protection mechanisms, Sonora reformed its laws to introduce economic incentives for landowners who voluntarily certify their lands for conservation. Due to outreach efforts in collaboration with the Mexican Association of Road Engineering, Article 22 Bis was added to the Federal Roads, Bridges and Auto-transportation Law, mandating that wildlife crossings be built in all new and modernized federal highways.