5.6 Transportation and Service Corridors
Transportation corridors can also fragment aquatic habitat at stream crossings due to culverts that do not allow aquatic organism passage. Culverts must be properly sized and positioned to allow aquatic organism to move freely upstream and downstream of cross- ings (Kilgore et al. 2010) . Failure of culverts to allow organisms to move upstream of crossings can restrict gene fow and isolate populations (Woford et al. 2005) . Poorly designed culverts can prevent upstream migration and recolonization upstream of culverts, eventually leading to extirpation above crossings (Jackson 2004) . River Herring migration may also be impeded by low light levels within culverts (Moser and Terra 1999) . Various groups are now working to iden- tify culverts that are barriers to aquatic organism passage and replace them with improved crossing structures. Utility crossings, such as aerial utility lines or underground pipes, also afect streams and wetlands at crossings because woody riparian vegetation is converted to maintained her- baceous vegetation. Tese utility corridor crossings create breaks in riparian vegetation that can reduce shading and lead to streambank erosion. Tese interruptions to riparian corridors can also impact species using forested riparian areas as travel corridors. Te National Wildlife Strike Database reported 99,411 wildlife strikes to airplanes have occurred since 1990, resulting in more than 200 human lives lost (Allan 2002; Dolbeer et al. 2010) . Te vast majority (97.4%) of all wildlife strikes involve birds (ACRP 2011) . Bird management at airports is best considered an adaptive process of deterrence where species composi- tion and behavior can be expected to change during the day, between seasons, and across years, even when techniques in this synthesis are actively employed. Many bird species habituate to deterrent techniques and will return to the area, particularly if the area is attractive to them. Airport managers often use repelling techniques, habitat modifcation, exclusion, population management, and notifcation to pilots as strategies to manage haz- ardous wildlife at or near the airport (Cleary and Dickey 2010; ACRP 2011) . 5.6.2 SGCN Priority Species Te Taxa Team evaluation considered the level of threat transportation and service corri- dors represents to SGCN priority species. Table 5.5 provides a list of species for which this threat category is consider very high or high.
T ABLE 5.5 SGCN at very high or high threat from transportation and service corridors
Threat Level Very High High
Scientifc Name
Common Name
AMPHIBIAN Ambystoma mabeei
Mabee’s Salamander
X X
Ambystoma tigrinum tigrinum
Eastern Tiger Salamander
700
2015 NC Wildlife Action Plan
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