Caltrans grant aims to scale up wildlife corridor blueprint

A $700,000 Caltrans planning grant will fund a Regional Wildlife Connectivity Study to map fragmented ecosystems across Southern California and design a coordinated framework to link them. The funding is part of a larger $23.6 million package for 58 planning projects statewide, supported by Senate Bill 1 and state and federal highway and transit dollars, and is meant to move local initiatives closer to construction by paying for project planning and conceptual design work.

Meanwhile, the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over U.S. 101 in Agoura Hills is more than 60% complete and has an official opening set for Dec. 2. The project’s final cost reached $114 million after pandemic-related inflation and winter-storm delays; its main freeway span is finished and crews are now building an extension over Agoura Road and importing millions of cubic feet of soil to establish native plant habitat. Local photographer Eric Zumstein captured aerial images showing work to connect the bridge to the surrounding Santa Monica Mountain open space.

The Southern California Association of Governments will use its portion of the grant to create a region-wide, data-driven blueprint in partnership with the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority. The study will produce mapping tools, data products, and guidelines so features like vegetated overpasses, underpasses and directional fencing become standard, cost-effective elements of future highway work. By covering the six-county SCAG region — Imperial, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura — planners aim to reduce barriers to wildlife movement, lower public-safety risks, address habitat-related carbon sequestration losses, and help local governments compete for federal environmental grants to build a unified, climate-resilient ecological network.