Wildlife Corridors

Animals need room to move about for finding food, reproducing, migrating between winter and summer habitats, and dispersing to new territory.. The map below shows how easy it is for them to move from one place to another. It was completed in 2021 by New Hampshire Fish and Game based on studies of how 16 representative species move through the landscape.

Habitat generalists, habitat specialists, area sensitive, and barrier sensitive wildlife species were included to capture the range of variation in dispersal behavior. Limiting factors due to various types of roads were considered as well as cliffs, steep slopes, and distance from water. Large bodies of water also present a barrier.

The shades of green represent areas of the easiest movement. Red represents the biggest barriers. You can see that Route 153, winding down the left side of town, presents a major barrier to most species. The yellow and orange network of other roads in town are also barriers to movement, but not as severe as Route 153. Animals tend to avoid areas where there are people, notably the red dots where people’s houses are along the roads.

The next map adds wildlife corridors to the last one. These dark green areas show blocks of over 50 acres of the state’s highest ranked habitats. Large blocks like this are important for wildlife to be able to use the landscape with a very low chance of encountering people.

The bright orange shows travel corridors most likely used by a variety of species. Large mammals such as moose, deer, fisher, and bear have large home ranges and need to move from one undisturbed block to others without interacting with people. The lighter orange shows travel routes for individual species the state studied in developing this information.

Wildlife corridors are critical for the conservation of wildlife in New Hampshire. The loss of wildlife corridors may result in direct mortality, habitat fragmentation, and barriers to dispersal. More specifically, mortality can affect the dispersal and viability of isolated populations, and eventually cause local extirpation. At greatest risk are slow-moving species (e.g., reptiles and amphibians), species that depend on high adult survivorship (e.g. turtle species), species that are long range dispersers (e.g. bobcats, American martens, wolves), and species with scarce populations (e.g. timber rattlesnakes). Large mammals crossing roadways (e.g., black bear, moose, and deer), although not likely to be a population viability concern, cause safety concerns for motorists.