Transportation professionals, including planners and engineers, desire to avoid conflicts and reduce mitigation costs, thereby increasing the reliability and predictability of transportation design processes.  Further, SAFETEA-LU requires involvement of participating agencies and partners to help improve and streamline the environmental process for transportation projects.  While much has been done to address large mammal and carnivore mitigation and passage, thus helping to streamline environmental processes when these animals are present, this is less true with smaller animals, and particularly for aquatic or semi-aquatic animals.  Best practices for design and mitigation to improve driver safety as well as to avoid wildlife conflict, especially in instances where roads are adjacent to or bisecting aquatic habitats, are sorely needed.  Given new dimensions and environmental threats such as climate change, transportation agencies must have the tools to avoid, rather than to inadvertently contribute toward potential future regulation (e.g., Endangered Species Act) due to increased rarity of species, as wildlife moves to newer, more suitable habitats.  

To address these needs, we have begun to develop a handbook describing and recommending best practices for small animals, using an ecosystem perspective to demonstrate considerations when land-to-land, land-to-water, or water-to-water passage, mitigation, retro-fitting, or other enhancement is concerned.   In turn, this ecosystem perspective allows the reader to understand needs relative to adaptation to climate change or other rapid landscape-level changes.  This handbook will encompass the suite of both direct and indirect effects of roads on small animals with attention to minimizing costs and conflicts while maximizing connectivity and natural ecological functions.The handbook has been approved for publication by The Wildlife Society as part of their Series through Johns Hopkins University Press.  We propose to complete the handbook manuscript for publication, as a single-source, non-competitive contract specifically to ensure that it contains state-of-the-art, best practices for small animals, including very specific construction documents, diagrams, and other user-friendly guidance as well as case studies and lessons learned. This resource manual will provide the tools to facilitate improved (adaptive) approaches for instances where new targeted objectives are specified, as well as when a need arises to enhance an existing approach.