The Ford government’s recent controversial deal with the feds to cancel an environmental-impact assessment for Highway 413 brought the premier closer to realizing his campaign promise, despite growing pushback from scientists and other political parties.
What would the impacts of this 52-kilometre highway actually be? TVO Today spoke with road ecologist Kari Gunson, principal of Eco-Kare International, about how the planned route could affect environmentally sensitive areas — and what citizens should look for in any government plan.
TVO Today: You’re a road ecologist. Can you tell me a bit more about what you do?
Kari Gunson: A token definition of road ecology is the study of interactions of roads with the environment, which includes vegetation, soil, air, water, and wildlife. We tend to specialize in what we are interested in or went to school for. I studied biology and ecology, which stamps me as a person that likes to study wildlife and the ecology of wildlife.
I started in Banff National Park, where they built two iconic wildlife overpasses in the 1990s, as well as some underpasses. I was fortunate enough to be able to monitor these overpasses from 1996 to 2008. There were a lot of myths around them — like that it was a waste of money and that there were going to be predators eating all the prey who tried to use them.
We found not only that the spectrum of species present in the area was using the wildlife overpasses, but also that grizzly bears were using the wildlife overpasses, and their numbers improved over time. That was what spurred the building of wildlife overpasses in Canada — not so much in Ontario yet, but in places like British Columbia. The Maritimes are starting to look into this, and you see a big push for wildlife overpasses in the United States.
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For the last 10 to 15 years in Ontario, I started to look at taking all the information that we learned out West on larger animals and applying that to smaller animals, primarily turtles and smaller mammals and snakes. Amphibians and reptiles were left behind in the last 20 years, and we’re starting to learn how to put in road mitigation for these guys as well.
TVO Today: When a new highway is built in an area, how does it change that environment?
Gunson: The highway is one thing. There’s the loss of habitat to build the highway in the first place, plus the effect on adjacent areas — what is called the road-effects zone. In that zone, there are indirect impacts such as salt runoff and air pollution, and impacts to the vegetation and soils around the road. These impacts can be different for different areas.
For animals, wildlife don’t tend to occupy lands adjacent to highways and roads, mainly because of noise pollution and the changes of habitat. There are also direct impacts such as roadkill.
For plants, the composition of the plants will change. Quite often, we get invasive plants around the highways. The big one is Phragmites australis along almost any major Ministry of Transportation highway in Ontario, especially Highway 401.
Phragmites australis, an invasive plant. (Conrad Kuiper/Flickr)
TVO Today: Why do invasive plants such as this grass end up taking over alongside highways?
Gunson: There’s a direct way. When we bring in the machinery to clear the land, the habitats, farmland, or wetlands, we clear the plant communities. The machines could very well have the seeds of the invasive plants on them, depending on where they could have been — on another highway, for example.
Also because when the land has been degraded or modified, it provides an opportunity for opportunistic plants to move in. Many times, those opportunistic plants are invasives because they do well in this kind of environment. That’s especially true with tolerant plants like phragmites. It’s very tolerant of harsh conditions such as salt conditions. These plants can move in quite quickly.
TVO Today: Does the planned route of Highway 413 come with any special considerations?
Gunson: At this point in time, Highway 413 is in preliminary environmental-assessment stage. I was looking on their website, and there’s an interactive map of the proposed route that it would take. Typically, you have the proposed route, and they’re supposed to look at alternatives for the least social, economic, and environmental impacts. Then the impacts they can’t avoid, they mitigate those primary impacts. That’s where Highway 413 is — still in the planning stage. So I’m not entirely sure of the special considerations that will come with the road at this point.
The red-headed woodpecker is an endangered species that would be affected by Highway 413. (The Lilac Breasted Roller/Wikimedia)
TVO Today: Would you be able to speak a bit more generally about the kinds of special considerations that are common for highways in southern Ontario?
Gerson: I work a lot with highways and wildlife. And with that, I also work a lot with the movement of water. Water is a top priority in road development because obviously we need to move water past the road. Where it moved freely before, it is now being constrained to specific culvert passages or bridge passages. It must travel that route to go through so that there’s no flooding. Obviously, we don’t want the road to be washed out.
There are always special considerations for water, drainage ditches, and also wetlands — you try not to remove the wetland and to allow it to move freely among the road. Sometimes, a wetland becomes degraded on one side of the road: what you try to do is you move the route of the road so that it keeps the entire wetland intact. Instead of bisecting a wetland, you would try to look at going around any provincially significant habitat.
If you can’t go around it, that’s when you consider things like the wildlife-exclusionary fencing and wildlife-crossing passages. You can combine those wildlife-crossing passages with the overpasses and the culverts.
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We don’t have enough of those in Ontario. We only have one for snakes in Windsor [on Highway 401] and one on Highway 69 [near Sudbury] for larger animals. They’re the best crossing features for these animals because they are multi-species. They provide a landscape bridge, and you can have habitat on these structures that the animals can use and feel safe when they cross.
TVO Today:The route of Highway 413 is not settled, and even building it is not settled. But speaking generally, if a new highway is built, could we expect to see more roadkill in the area?
Gerson: Definitely. Whenever a highway or road is built, there’s more roadkill. That’s what roadkill is: running over wildlife trying to move where they used to before the road was there. All the wildlife that used to move through the area will be moving across the road. You can calculate it: there are algorithms that tell you, with the traffic speed and the traffic volumes, how much roadkill there will be for each taxa, for vertebrate species, specifically: turtles, snakes, birds, and mammals.
The eastern meadowlark is classified as threatened in Ontario. (Kenneth Cole Schneider/Flickr)
TVO Today: Ontario hasn’t built many new 400-series highways since 2000. Have those new highways, such as the 412 and the 418 and the expansions of existing 400-series highways, had some of the mitigation measures that we’ve discussed?
Gunson: We haven’t seen what we’ve wanted to on 400-series highways since the millennium. We need to see more wildlife overpasses. I know there are conversations in eastern Ontario with the Highway 401 expansion, which crosses the Frontenac Arch Biosphere. We’ve also got the Algonquin to Adirondack initiative in that area, and I know there is conversation there about putting in a wildlife overpass. It takes consultation and collaboration between non-profit groups, Queen’s University, and the MTO — and that said, the MTO is divided into five different regions. It’s a matter of getting the right people within that region to have these conversations.
The bobolink is on the list of 11 at-risk species threatened by the planned route of Highway 413. (Andrew Weitzel/Wikimedia)
When the newer part of the 407 was built, I was working at the Toronto Zoo, and we were trying to get mitigation installed on these new 400 highways. This was when the Liberal government was in, and we actually had a committee with the Ministry of Transportation. Members of the Ontario Road Ecology Group would meet, and we would discuss different mitigation strategies for wildlife — the bridges and the culverts and how to employ them in way that we could get the best data about whether they work or not. You have to put these crossing structures in specific places in a rigorous statistical way for us to get the best research. We actually had those conversations on Highway 413 when it was first being discussed. Those conversations are no longer happening, so we’re not exactly sure where the mitigation conversation is on this highway.
TVO Today: What does road-ecology research tell us about the impact of new highways?
Gerson: There was a declaration made by the Infra Eco Network Europe in 2014 where we all made a pact that we would strive, as road ecologists, to not put roads in roadless areas.
If you build a new road in urban area, that’s one thing. It’s already paved over, so the impacts are less. But if you build the road in an area of farmland, wetlands, or meadows, the impact is going to be higher because now you’ve made the fragmentation of the area so much more. There are algorithms and calculations to help quantify those indicators.
The western chorus frog calling
With roads that are going to be built adjacent to or bisect areas that we’re trying to keep more natural for various reasons, such as the Greenbelt, impacts will be higher. All of a sudden, we’re putting in a road and changing the hydrology and the natural landscape for the animals and humans that live there.
The biggest impact is the exploitation of the adjacent lands, because now there is a road to get people there. The number one reason we want to keep wild landscapes road-free is because once you put the road, then you can bring urban sprawl, right?
TVO Today: What should members of the public who are concerned about the 413 be looking for in any plan put forward to build a new 400-series highway on that land?
Gunson: The first and foremost mitigation measure is not to build the road in the first place. We’ve all tried to consider that with our politicians, and they keep saying we’re going full speed ahead. So we’re kind of losing that battle.
I think the main thing is to choose the best route that will have the fewest impacts and then to mitigate the impacts. If I had my way, I would choose to allow the 407 to carry vehicles to its capacity. And that way, we don’t need a new highway. Three highways paralleling each other — 401, 407, 413 — why do we need that if we can just move the cars to the 407? But that is another issue.
We’re now at the mitigation-measure point where we want to reduce the impacts. How can we do that? Fewer vehicles is number one, a lesser footprint, and then after that, we look for bridges to span the wetlands — so, don’t destroy the wetlands. We look for upsize culverts to allow higher capacities of water to move through so the water isn’t so channelized and we maintain natural hydraulic processes. My biggest push for the 413, if I were involved in discussions, would be wildlife overpasses, especially in the eastern part of the route where it crosses conservation reserves, such as the Nashville Conservation Reserve, which is owned by the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority. Those are the kinds of areas where you would push for something like this. The costs of these kinds of things are such a low overall percentage of the entire road project.
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TVO Today: Finally, is there anything else I should be asking you about?
Gunson: The only other thing that people should be aware of is that there are 11 species at risk in the area. Most of them are birds. The redheaded woodpecker is a keystone species that’s spoken about a lot, and also the eastern meadowlark. These are the kind of species that we need to mitigate for, knowing that they’re there.
However, with birds, because they fly, we don’t know how to mitigate for them properly. This is a concern. There could be a push for the wildlife overpass for that reason: making that wildlife overpass have habitat on it for the birds so they fly over or feel more comfortable flying over or even resting in wildlife-overpass habitat on their migrations.
This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
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