Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Jens Hilke, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department (Conservation Biologist)]: Vermont, this pattern is gonna look a little different. In the Champlain Valley, for example, that riparian network, that's those streamside connectors are are often the type of vegetation that's connecting our largest forest blocks. And up along the spine of the greens or in the Northeastern Highlands, we often have massive forest blocks that are really connected block to block. And and they're you know, the stream network is is certainly all in there, but doesn't have that same connectivity nexus necessarily. So different parts of Vermont are gonna look a little different with respect to this pattern, but that's the larger land use pattern that we need to maintain to maintain our populations. So I've spoken to this committee in the past about the conservation design, and there's a lot to say here, a lot more than we have time for. But I'll just remind you all that this is the it's a design. It's our plan for how much is enough, what are the most important lands and waters to maintain for ecological function both now and into the future? So it is a prioritization. It tells us, where those places are that are most important and how much of them we really need if we wanna maintain not only our current biological diversity, but climate resilience into the future. The design, of course, is available on the Biofinder website, and and I'm happy to come back at a later date if you would like to hear more about the design and all the the various parts of that. But I did just wanna speak about, this landscape scale. So we're again, we're thinking about this larger land use pattern, this larger pattern across the landscape. And so many of the components in the design really speak to that that pattern that we're looking for. And so interior forest, that's what I spoke about before as four forests. Those are the largest forest blocks in each biophysical region. So, those are critically important for biological diversity, for our working landscape, for human health and recreation, and all manner of different community and social and economic and ecological values. Now connecting forests are include those stepping stones that I spoke about earlier as well as those largest forest blocks. And so if you look closely at the pink, the interior forest, that does not create a connected pattern north to south, east to west. Those are simply the largest blocks in each region. The orange, by contrast, does make that larger connected pattern. So, again, that includes both those core forest blocks as well as those smaller stepping stone blocks. So this is that pattern of connectivity that we need to maintain across the landscape. And then, of course, there's geological diversity, and so some of our forest blocks are representing the the geological underpinnings and and are more likely to have to create conditions for biological diversity. And then, of course, the entire surface water and riparian area now. So that was the landscape scale. Also within the conservation design is this concept of wildlife road crossings. So here, I'm talking about over the road crossings. So we model those based on the amount of forced block, habitat block, on both sides of the road. And so, at left, you can see that there are blue plots on both sides of the road. And when that plot, this is a model now, this wasn't done on the ground, this was done by computer. And so those blocks on both sides of the road, if they have more than 75% habitat block in that plot, we colored it blue and it flags that there's good cover on that side of the road. When that exists on both sides of the road, we flagged it as a highest priority wildlife road crossing. So that tells us that those forest blocks are out there, the big core forest, and that they get close to the road. So I'm switching scales. I'm trying to tell you about these largest forest blocks that are existing at the landscape scale and also at the at this local scale where those forest blocks blocks touch the road and how important that is for wildlife movement. Now some of these locations also have bridges and culverts, and we'll talk a lot more about those over the coming minutes. But that's a critically important piece for where there's the potential for getting animals under the road and not simply up on the road surface. But what you see here is just a model of where there is a great likelihood that animals are crossing the road, generally over. In total, there's something like 5,900 miles on the Vermont road network that's been identified as highest priority wildlife road crossing. So there's a tremendous amount. And the reason for that is we get animals cross the road one at a time. In the Eastern US, we don't have huge herds of ungulates that are pronghorn antelope that are crossing over the Highway 3000 at a time. We have that one moose get up on the road surface, and so our network of wildlife road crossings is much more diffuse. We have that one crossing at a time, but it could be in a huge variety of locations. Then there's also a category here for priority locations, and then, there is a something that with a drastically lower standard called potential wildlife crossings, that was really done for Addison County, where the the forest blocks are much more fragmented, you don't have places, many places, where there's even 50% habitat block on both sides of the road. And so where there's a hint of wildlife road crossing, that is is was flagged for this potential category to give planners a sense of where they might engage in landscape restoration. So we don't use that potential class for anything other than than really in that more agricultural landscape to help planners. So let's talk a little bit about bobcat. So male bobcat move on average about 19 miles per day every day. In the Champlain Valley, they have a home range of 27 square miles, the males do. So they are moving around a lot to get what they need. Now some of that movement is daily. Right? They're waking up. They're they're they're very efficient in moving straight line. They're not zigzagging back and forth like your your dog is. They they really are on a very tight energy budget and are are moving very directly to the next food potential food source. Now there's also, different food sources available at different times of the year. So as you think about that 27 mile home range, there are gonna be pockets of food that are available in the spring or the summer and the fall in different locations. And so that movement over the course of the year is inherently going to take them into different forest blocks. There are other types of movement. So we might that's seasonal movements. Right? There are also big dispersal events. They are very difficult to predict. But a few years ago, we had a a Canada Lynx on camera. This one in Searsburg. I'm not referring to the Rutland one last year. So that was a dispersing male. He chose a direction. He started to go and was looking literally looking for love in in all the wrong places. So those big dispersal events are very important from a conservation biology perspective. They can result in exchange of, you know, in creating more heterogeneous populations, really genetic diversity. So, those are incredibly important events. They're very difficult to predict. We had a we we've tracked we have telemetry collars on bear in Southern Vermont, and there's a story of a male bear that did a 140 kilometer journey from Bennington to Brattleboro and back one October in response to a bad mass year. So there's a lot of different types of movement. It's not just crossing the road for daily needs. It could be seasonal or it could be yearly. It could be these bigger bigger events. Now we often use the word migration, and I'll talk more about that in the context of salamanders, where there is, in fact, a migration of thousands of salamanders every year right about now, particularly in the Champlain Valley. It'd be a great great night, actually, to look for salamanders. I I usually take my boys actually in Burlington to go look for salamanders, But I digress. So the so there we do have migrations in Vermont with respect to these salamanders, and I'll talk about those at the end. So, this is a model from our friends at the Nature Conservancy called Migrations in Motion. It looks at some, 3,000 species of mammals, birds, and amphibians and where they are moving in response to climate change. They find that on average, populations are moving about 11 miles per decade, about a mile per year in response to climate change north and South of the Equator. Entire populations moving a mile a year away from the Equator in response to climate change. Now please note how the Northeast is a real pinch point in this continental scale movement of of species. Pinched between the green the Great Lakes and the coast, there's there's a real pinch point here. So, again, I'm switching scales. We talked about that that pattern on the Vermont landscape of of core forest and connecting blocks. Well, that matters a great deal at this continental scale. The forest and the forested and aquatic connections that we enjoy in Vermont are important for that continental scale movement of species as they're coming north. Now it's not just a straight go north or bust. The network of connectivity in Vermont is much more complicated than that. And so if you actually just follow the spine of the greens up into Quebec, it it's there's quite a lot

[Representative Ela Chapin]: of farmland. You really need to go a little bit more northeast to connect up to the suns. So it's it's a network of connectivity across Vermont that supports movement within Vermont to meet those daily and seasonal needs as well as this continental scale movement of populations.

[Jens Hilke, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department (Conservation Biologist)]: So let's go back to thinking about a particular structure and a particular road segment, and this one is is really pretty commonplace. Do wanna

[Andrea, Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans)]: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Bringing it into the transportation infrastructure here. Traditionally, we we're a bunch of engineers, and we size our structures based on hydrology and hydraulics. That's the way we have done it traditionally. And then I would say really at the beginning of the 2000s, but more so and really pointedly after Tropical Storm Irene, where we saw how much damage sediment transport and debris can cause, that we've worked really closely with the river management engineers to consider that in our designs. We've updated our, design standards to consider that. And when we do that, we go from the culvert, shown there in the upper right, to this bridge, And clearly, it has resilience benefits because it's going to pass those bigger flows and the debris and different sediment that comes through with those flows during a storm event, but also then has the opportunity to provide terrestrial movement, underneath the bridge. You can see there with the stone fill and the grass that there would be a pathway for all kinds of animals and even larger ones to pass under that and provide that connectivity. So we get a dual benefit when we think about resilience, and we get that benefit for wildlife connectivity as well.

[Jens Hilke, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department (Conservation Biologist)]: And the vast majority of species are well served when we build new. Those hydrologic standards are are really doing quite quite nicely for most of our species most of the time, And and so that's a huge win win win, in my opinion, for Vermonters. Here's another example of five replacements along with 12. Do you wanna this off?

[Andrea, Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans)]: Yeah. Sure. This is just a good example I said earlier, in the first slide there that, we really work together from the from the get go. We have a process, in our project design really early on in our scoping phase when we're just trying to figure out exactly what we're gonna do with a project, called resource ID, and we look at what's around, the project area and identify what needs there are in that project area. And so, this is an example of five culverts along, Route 12 that we had an opportunity to think about that and using, let's see, the map up there where we knew there was high priority areas for land conservation, and a lot of work done in that area already, that we had an opportunity to think about what we could do when we were replacing these culverts. And so, again, there's five culverts there. We upsized all of them. There's species of concern in this area, and we were able to incorporate all manners of different types of species, from stream, more aquatic organism passage, all the way up until the bigger animals. One of these, And we also at the agency have recently worked on what we call our resilience improvement plan, part of the infrastructure investment initiative, provided money for us to do that. So we have priorities for resilience that we've identified, and one of these culverts is the same thing. So we went from a culvert that was 36% bankfull width to a bridge that was 180 something percent bankfull width. And so really, again, for that resilience benefit and providing the opportunity to cross wildlife in that area.

[Jens Hilke, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department (Conservation Biologist)]: Yeah.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Are the moose able to use your new structures?

[Jens Hilke, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department (Conservation Biologist)]: Do you know? We know We we'll see. They were just constructed. The first three were constructed last year. They'll finish off the last two this summer.

[Andrea, Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans)]: Construction is complete, but just recently. Oh, great.

[Jens Hilke, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department (Conservation Biologist)]: Well, I look forward to visit. When our preconstruction cameras were six feet underwater, And so I'm I'm confident that the larger structures, there are two bridges. One is a 77 span. There's another 87 83 foot span. I'm confident those will will work for moose. And in fact, we had a collared moose in Bloomfield that up and headed to Faeston and then no offense intended, headed back to Bloomfield was within meters of these structures. And so we're really hopeful that this will work. So we've done pre construction monitoring and now that the construction is done and they'll let us back in the area, we can do a post construction monitoring. So we have a camera cameras deployed there. No surprise. We found nothing moving through those structures preconstruction. We have a so I'm really anxious to see what will happen. And here is one of those structures. And at right, you can see the the wildlife shelf that was built under the bridge. And since then, we've gone back and added a little bit of fencing to encourage movement under the road at that location rather than up and over the road. Representative

[Representative Ela Chapin]: Ela.

[Andrea, Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans)]: Do you have cameras, like night cameras? Yes, you do, so you can see them?

[Jens Hilke, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department (Conservation Biologist)]: Yes, exactly.

[Andrea, Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans)]: I'd love to see that.

[Jens Hilke, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department (Conservation Biologist)]: I have, no exaggeration, half a million photos of successful animal crossings, and I'd be happy to share this with you. It'd be

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: great. Yeah. I don't know how to know.

[Jens Hilke, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department (Conservation Biologist)]: Yeah. We use we use Reconyx cameras, so they they're really the top of the line. And we've been engaged in camera monitoring together since 2014 and have used that camera data to build the terrestrial passage screening tool that we'll talk about at the end. But really years of collaboration, science report after report that's really led to some some pretty excellent outcomes.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: How wide is that little wildlife terrace?

[Jens Hilke, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department (Conservation Biologist)]: That one is about four feet. But our first one at the Little River site was about eight feet and the wider we make it, the more people we get using it. So we're current. My current language when I talk to project managers is goat path. Really just this is just for moose and deer hooved animals that can't negotiate those big boulders and and we really just need a small goat path for those species to maneuver. And so two feet wide would be fine and and even even less. Feet for a moose? Yeah. Yep. They're good with their feet. Great. This one, I'll just kick off. This is a structure on Route 9 in Searsburg that was constructed in 2004. This was one where the department really went to bat for it in the name of Black Bear when the agency of transportation was replacing it. And it's a beautiful structure that passes that Black Bear in the bottom right. You can see maybe difficult, but that's a whole family of bear moving under and at the top right is that Canada lynx that I mentioned earlier. So we absolutely we might appropriately size these for hydrology, and yet we get all manner of benefits. And then even here, the target species, we get more species than that using them. So we're really thrilled when these appropriately sized structures work. I think you said here.

[Andrea, Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans)]: No. I just would say, I I don't think we have a slide on it, but we have one on just further to the west from here on the way to Bennington that we we also considered. Jens talked about the data that they had on black bear movement in this area. And so having that data, knowing that it's a connection along the spine of the Green Mountains in the South, just looking at the project that we had, we had, can't remember the size of the culvert, but something like a six or seven foot culvert that we ended up going to something that was, I don't know the size of bridge even, but like way, way, way bigger than the culvert that was there. And that does provide that crossing. So that's a valuable place that we know of from the work that they've done, from the data that we have, and the monitoring that has been done. And that's where we can make those good cases to put in the extra investment to help with a shared goal of the state.

[Jens Hilke, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department (Conservation Biologist)]: So I did mention the Little River Shelf earlier. This was our first Wabbe Shelf. It's about eight feet wide. It was part of the route to reclaim. So I don't know if any of you are in the Richmond area, but you may recall the miserable traffic on route to a few years ago, well, 2014. So that was contracted to be an $8,000,000 full depth reconstruction of Route 2. I believe it wound up being a $10,000,000 job or something. So the $20,000 to create this first wildlife shelf was really an insignificant sum in the larger project budget, and yet it wound up being an incredibly important proof of concept for us. So in the bottom right, you can see that deer are using the shelf and that erosion control matting is still on. So this is days, weeks, months after construction and already the deer are using it to avoid going up and over I-eighty 9. Research out west suggests that it'll take three to five years for bobbet populations to really get accustomed to an overpass or an underpass. And so I like to think our deer are smarter, but but it is a really good sign.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: So 20,000 was for like, that would have just been stone or something? Yes. And so you bought fill and planted it in, and that's what the

[Jens Hilke, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department (Conservation Biologist)]: 20,000 is. Got it. Yes. And so in this case, was grubbings from the construction project. So we talk about waste borrow and staging areas in transportation lingo. So the waste material from a project can be used to fill in the interstices, the nooks and crannies of those big three foot boulders. And so have it. It is a real opportunity to to to create these five left shelves. So I said this was our pilot. It is now standard practice on bridges to put the grubbing material, the dirt on top of those big boulders underneath the bridge for any structure where there's more than six feet of space between ordinary high water and the bottom of the iron. So this is a standard detail that's used in V TRANS engineering. I have pictures of every mammal, actually, except Bear, using the Little River Shelf. We've monitored it continuously since 2014. It's an incredibly successful structure. We'll talk more about this area in a few slides, this area between water brain duct spray.

[Andrea, Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans)]: Yeah. This is the standard that Jens was just talking about because we know that it works so well there. We have created this standard drawing that we put into our projects when there is six feet of clearance between the stone fill and the bottom of the bridge structure, the substructure. And traditionally, we didn't want to grub that or vegetate that because then things would grow up into our substructure, cause rust more quickly. But what we're finding is that just the nature of the shading that is created, it doesn't allow for really high vegetation, and then there's movement over it. So the vegetation has not been a problem in these areas, and so it's been sort of a win win. We're able to accommodate that movement pretty easily on a lot of our projects, and it is standard where we have the room to do so.

[Jens Hilke, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department (Conservation Biologist)]: And the photo is by the shelf under Route 15 in Walcott that was done with private funding, but more recently, and you can see how the width has has been shrunk. This one's about two feet to to really focus on on those hoofed animals. Bear will navigate those big boulders, and we do have bear crossing under this under this section of Route 15. So this, again, is really for the moose and the and the deer. But I we do have moose bedding down right beside this underpass, so we're we're confident it's being used. So I was just speaking about the Little River site, and and so that is there's about nine miles of Interstate 89 where the forest block associated with Mount Mansfield. So again, not just Mount Mansfield State Park itself, but the public and private land, all of that forest, that forest to the North and the Campbell's Hump Block, again, public private to the South. There's about nine miles of Interstate 89 route to the Winooski River, the railroad River Road, that, that are in between those two forest blocks. And so this area is is incredibly important for wildlife movement, again, at that continental scale of allowing for wildlife movement, excuse me. The Little River Shelf is at the extreme eastern end of those nine miles. Pinneo Brook Culvert is at the extreme western end, and then there's another culvert in the middle called Sharkeyville. And so those three structures are really are really critically important for allowing for wildlife movement between those those forest blocks. So in this area, there's been a tremendous amount of effort to reconnect the greens, to bring the permanently protected private land all the way down to the highway, down to the river on both sides to really ensure and have that line up with transportation kind of transportation infrastructure to ensure that there can be wildlife movement here in in perpetuity. So there's a long list of NGO partners, the Mont Lawn Land Trust, the Nature Conservancy, the Northeast Wilderness Trust, the Stowe Land Trust, the Waterbury Lands Initiative, the Trust for Public Land. I may have missed some, forgive me, But there's a tremendous consortium that's really focused on on improving land protection in this area, working with willing landowners. And so that's tremendously successful, particularly when it helps line up with that transportation infrastructure. So here, you can see the location of those those three structures, and you can see the permanently protected land. And so that's been a huge investment over the years, over many years, with a whole variety of partners in terms of that permanently protected land. And I would say that we're not quite done yet. There's more work to be done to really ensure that there's connectivity here in perpetuity and that it lines up with this transportation infrastructure.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Have have any of these three been upgraded?

[Jens Hilke, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department (Conservation Biologist)]: So Little River is Shelf. Little River is currently functioning. Pinto is a tough one. The railroad is on that side, on the same side of the river at that location, so we have I-eighty 9, Route 2, and the railroad all with one structure. It is wall to wall concrete, so it's a box. We have jeeps going through there and snow machines and ATVs and not a lot of wildlife. When that reaches the end of its service life, it will be appropriately sized to based on the hydrology, and so I'm confident it will be much bigger to allow for wildlife movement. Sharkeyville is the the site of a proposed wildlife underpass. The agency of transportation and the agency of natural resources opted this year not to apply for construction funding because of the costs associated with the match. So that would have been about $3,000,000 in match. And given the budget this year, that was too much to handle. Let me be clear that that project remains a priority for me and my department, and we're absolutely committed to ensuring that we can get a structure that works for wildlife in this section. But it is a tough budget year. Here's that Pineal Brook Culvert, and you can see a deer getting near it and turning around. And and so we don't know what happened. There could have been a sound. There could be could be any number of things. But that culvert has a turn in it, and so you can't see all the way to the end. And deer are a little skittish, and so I I think the combination of of the tightness of the structure and not being able to see through to the end, it it was the problem here. But, you know, this one, we're we're we're gonna wait till it reaches the end of its service life. There has been a tremendous amount of investment in land protection at this area. This was going to be the location where the long trail went under I eighty nine before they built that bridge, footbridge over the Winooski. So there's been a lot of land protection. But then recently, in 2021, the town of Bolton reworked its zoning, and the town residents were very concerned about connectivity, had spoken about the importance of connectivity for many years. Bolton, the motto, by the way, is the land of boulders and bears, and they take that very seriously. And so when it came time to change their zoning, they did, in fact, withdraw the zoning district boundaries, and they brought their forest and conservation districts. So I'm talking about zoning. When I say conservation district, I'm talking about a zoning district. So they brought those zoning district boundaries down to the highway, and those match up with permanently protected land on the other side in Duxbury, and it lines up with this Pineal Brook Culvert. So within the powers of town land use review and land use planning, they were able to really line up their vision for growth and conservation for their town with transportation infrastructure and this larger vision of connectivity. It's really a tremendous success. In this case, there were only about five landowners the affected area. All of them were already in the use value appraisal program, so none of them had any concerns with shifting from a rural residential district to a forestry district. So, know, Bolton, it was small enough, they were able to ask all five of them. Must be next. Amphibians are different. Nationwide, there are about a million deer hit on US roads every year, and still the population is is stable and growing in places. So roadkill for that species doesn't amount to a population size problem. Many species of reptiles and amphibians are, forgive the pun, hit harder by roadkill because their species that are late to sexual reproduction and maybe have fewer offspring are more at risk. So you can kill a population of turtles pretty quickly with just a few female turtle stripes. And so there are some populations where we we need to be absolutely concerned about the entire populations with respect to wildlife vehicle collisions. In the town of Moncton, this is a town owned road, the town conservation commission, the Lewis Creek Association, worked with, the agency of transportation to secure, at the time, I think it was an iced tea, I think it was one of the transportation enhancement grants, and also a state wildlife grant to build two structures under, Moncton Road, to allow for amphibian movement. And so you can see those two structures here. They look just like culverts. They're not. They don't move water. Those are intentionally high. So they do not that is not a stream. This was built for amphibians. And so here is a case where most of the time when we build to the hydrologic standards, it works for most species. Reptiles and amphibians are taxa where I'm concerned that that approach won't necessarily work, and over time we will need to have wildlife specific structures. And so the Moncton Amphibian Crossing is really a tremendous example of a of a successful project that's moving thousands of of amphibians and other species as well. So that's a bobcat at left. That black black bear, that's a photo from 2021. But, you can see that his shoulders were practically touching the top of the of the structure. And so it is interesting to me that this bear chose to go under rather than over. Oh, one thing I forgot to mention. Please note this concrete block. Do you see that beside the beside the structure? So, that funnels amphibians into the structure, so it's best practice to funnel animals into an underpass. For amphibians, that's pretty easy for us to do. This was waste concrete block. And so it was pretty inexpensive to just pile it up. And it is, I believe 83% effective. So species that don't climb the, oh, forgive me, 83% across all species, 97% for, for species that don't climb. It's tremendously effective at funneling animals into the shelf. It's the same concept applies to bigger animals. Like it would be great if we had 10 foot chain link fencing, encouraging animals into our underpasses. From a Western perspective, would be considered the best practice. Five kilometers of fencing on both sides of the road In a Vermont context, that would really have us look like a maximum security prison. And, we have so many more roads and so many more side roads that we don't get five kilometers on both sides of the road where there isn't another driveway coming in. And so we run the risk of, if we were to do that fencing, to really keep animals on the road rather than funnel them into the structure. If they go around, then they're trapped on the road. So here's a place where we have not engaged. We just generally speaking, we don't do that kind of massive exclusionary fencing. It and and there's a case to be made for it, and there's certainly a case to be made against it. So, we mentioned at the outset that our agencies have been working together for quite some time. Since 2004, the Agency of Transportation has run a highways and habitats training that the department has been a part of, and it's really a tremendous or wonderful collaboration. I will note we have had legislators attend this training in the past. I am extending the invite to all of you. We'll run it in September. It's four Wednesdays all day and we get our hands dirty. The tier one, of course, is a online introduction to road ecology. The tier two is this field based training. It's primarily geared towards agency of transportation staff to really help them understand more about the biology and natural history of our species. So typically in the mornings, we're out in the big forest blocks, we're tracking animals, we're holding up egg masses, we're looking at salamanders, we're flipping cover. We're really looking at those species and understanding more about their needs. And then in the afternoons, we'll go and look at infrastructure that is accommodating those needs. We're going to the road sections and we're talking more about the, forgive the pun, intersection of the animals and the road network. So this has been tremendously successful. We've been running it since 2004, and now many of the early career professionals who took this training are middle and late career professionals. And so the types of conversations we have across with our our colleagues in the agency of transportation over time has really changed as more and more of them have become aware of some of these issues. So tremendously exciting. And so as we for Sheldon, you asked me about our our nationally known relationship, I'd say highways and habitats is really responsible for that. Tremendously successful. And the other piece was buried in something that Andrea said with that resource ID happening before scoping that allows that's the tool to allow for early and frequent communication between our agencies.

[Andrea, Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans)]: And our training course has earned FHWA Federal Highway Administration Award of Excellence too, I can't remember which year that was, but a lot of other states are coming to us and asking, how did you do this? How did you get this going? There are other states that have some form of it now because of the work that was done here in Vermont.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: I don't know if North.

[Jens Hilke, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department (Conservation Biologist)]: Thank you, Chair. Just a clarification. You said one of

[Representative Ela Chapin]: the keys was to identify resource ID. What did you mean by that?

[Jens Hilke, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department (Conservation Biologist)]: So resource ID, do you want to?

[Andrea, Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans)]: Yeah, it's really early on in our project development, the phases of project development, and really, it's during scoping, which scoping for us is deciding what treatment is going to be done at allocation, depending on the asset condition and what needs to be done. So for a bridge, we might replace the superstructure, just the deck, or the substructure, the abutments also. We're really figuring out what we're going to do there, how we're going to construct that during scoping. And so before that, or as part of that early, early process, we haven't done any conceptual plans, no plans at all, just really scoping to see what we want to do. An alternatives analysis during that phase is we have a resource ID. We do it for natural resources. We do it for cultural resources. And we look for reasons that we would want to incorporate things like wildlife crossing. So biologists are looking at the work that ANR has done in mapping some of the work that we've done, some of the research that's been done in identifying this is a place where we should look to incorporate

[Representative Ela Chapin]: certain features. The resources you're identifying are the natural resources in the area,

[Jens Hilke, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department (Conservation Biologist)]: not how what resources can they bring to bear. But also,

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: by culturally, you must mean, do a lot of pedestrians cross? There's this swimming hole. Is that what that means?

[Andrea, Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans)]: There is an aspect to that. By cultural, I meant archaeology and historic resources. Yeah. And that was a big thing for archaeology. We used to spend a lot of money doing archaeology work on projects. And by identifying where those areas are, we can avoid them and not to dig up what people don't want dug up, we don't have to spend money and time on that as well. So that resource ID process is really important for a lot of different reasons.

[Jens Hilke, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department (Conservation Biologist)]: So we have our crowdsourcing, our road crossing information, and so we have an app and we have a web page where we're collecting input from the public and from folks at VTrans and the state police, to, to report, wildlife vehicle collisions and near misses, but wildlife crossings. We've been running this since 2021. Over time, this will be a great source of information. At the moment, it speaks to where people were excited about reporting roadkill rather than where there is the full extent of where there's roadkill in Vermont. So I would encourage you to to to be patient. We really need to grow this with more and more users and more and more information to truly have an understanding of where the roadkill are and where those pinch points are. But it's been very exciting to see it take hold and to see people get excited about reporting successful crossings as well as as wildlife vehicle collisions. And then lastly, our agencies have been working together to develop a wildlife transportation action plan. We looked at all of the structures that VTrans maintains. So anything that's on the state road system or the bigger structures on the town road system. So it's 5,000 some structures that V Trans is responsible for in terms of big culverts or bridges. And so we looked at the full extent of those and then began to then added what you see in orange is those from the conservation design, those highest priority connectivity blocks. And then we also filtered them based on where there were wildlife road crossings. So again, that local scale where the block actually gets close to the road on both sides. So what we emerge with is twelve eighty five structures that we believe are ecologically important because they work at that landscape scale. They're part of that that those connectivity blocks, those highest priority network of forests, and they work at that local scale. We do in fact know that they've got forest on both sides of the road. Now, to be clear, some of those structures may be passing wildlife just fine. So we are just looking at the structure, their locations at this point. But I had mentioned that terrestrial passage screening tool earlier, and that was that tells us more about the characteristics of the structures and which which of the structures of the bridges and culverts are are likely to be passing wildlife. So we can bring in the the TPSD scores here. And then maybe most importantly is its condition. We don't have money to build wildlife structures just because we want to. And so we're really looking for places where the structures that are towards the end of their service life that can be replaced. And when they're replaced, they can be appropriately sized and perhaps there's a wildlife component to that. So of those 1,200 structures, 67 of them are in poor condition, and so that represents the next, the nearest subset of structures that we'd like to look at with respect to, you know, when they get repaired or replaced, what can we do to to appropriately size those for wildlife, or what sort of mitigation efforts can we engage in? More to say on the TPSD? Not too

[Andrea, Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans)]: much on or, yeah, on the on the plan here itself. Just think I for us, it's just sort of a continuous improvement and knowledge, like expanding the knowledge base in our agency, working from what you all have done and from what our biologists know and incorporate into our project reviews, and sort of educating the rest of our agency to say these are our priorities and here is why, here is what's going into this, and just layering those different tools that we've worked on for the years to identify those highest priority areas. Certainly with the asset condition, looking at what is the nearest opportunity coming up that we should not miss. Like Jens said, some of those might be okay for the species that are in that area. But just, again, honing in, getting more details on our identification and prioritization.

[Jens Hilke, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department (Conservation Biologist)]: Now there are other audiences for this as well. So I mentioned that collaboration of Reconnecting the Greens, but that's really part of the Staying Connected initiative, this public private partnership focused on habitat connectivity across the Northeastern North America. And so Vermont Agency of Transportation and Fish and Wildlife Department are both partners there. We have Vermont meetings four times a year. And so that brings in the the big land trusts, the agency of transportation land use planning interests. And so the land protection community is very excited about this as well because they can begin to look at the network of permanently connected land with respect to transportation infrastructure. And so some of the parcels that they might be considering, again, willing landowners, some of the parcels that they might be considering are part of this network, in fact are adjacent to transportation infrastructure. So it's very exciting to see our colleagues in the Nature Conservancy and other land trusts begin to use this and help prioritize their actions based on this information. And with that, I'll say thank you very much. This is from Richmond Elementary School in 2025. They were engaged in a roadkill prevention project. So this is one of the posters and I just wanted to give a shout out to them. But thank you all so much. Really appreciate your having us here today. Thank you.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Thank you for your work and your wonderful presentation.

[Jens Hilke, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department (Conservation Biologist)]: Do

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: members have questions?

[Representative Ela Chapin]: This was very helpful. Very informative.

[Andrea, Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans)]: Thank you again. Thank you.