Liberty Canyon Wildlife Crossing Could Break Ground This Year

AGOURA HILLS, CA— The Liberty Canyon Wildlife Crossing to help animals safely traverse the 101 freeway is on track to break ground by the end of this year, officials said. According to wildlife advocates, it couldn't come soon enough.

The wildlife crossing is considered key to the survival of Los Angeles County's wildlife, namely the endangered mountain lion. Freeway traffic is one of the primary threats to the survival of pumas in Southern California.

Blueprints for the project will likely be ready by the end of August, CalTrans Project Manager Sheik Moinuddin told Patch. Groundbreaking will likely happen in late November or December after designs and bids on construction are completed, according to CalTrans, which took over the final design phase of the project in 2018.

Fundraising for the project has already garnered $38 million out of an estimated $65 million need for construction, Beth Pratt, the National Wildlife Federation's California regional director said.

The wildlife crossing project has been split into two phases — the main crossing over the 101 freeway, and the smaller crossing over Agoura Road.

Moinuddin said the project would likely finish in 2023 or 2024.

Costs and Fundraising

The project is still millions of dollars away from its estimated $65 million price tag. Pratt said it would need to raise $27 million more by the end of August to be able to break ground on time.

“We have $27 million more to go, which sounds like a lot, but … some things in play are looking good,” Pratt said. “But we still need folks to step up, definitely.”

So far, Liberty Canyon has gathered more than 3,000 donors from around the world, including individuals, foundations and government agencies.

California also recently allocated $61 million to wildlife crossings across the state, including $7 million to Liberty Canyon. The federal government also passed the INVEST in America Act on July 1, which includes $5 million to the Liberty Canyon crossing.

Biodiversity Restoration

The project is aimed at restoring biodiversity to a region divided by busy freeways and development. Animals like wrentits or deer are wary of crossing wide freeways like the 101, while others that attempt to cross are killed by cars. Habitat loss fragmentation and habitat loss are the greatest threats to mountain lion populations, California Department of Fish and Wildlife scientist Jamie Rudd told Patch.

Mountain lions are a particular concern for death caused by vehicles — 75 to 100 mountain lions are killed by cars on California roads every year, state officials told Patch last year.

This separation results in a reduction in genetic diversity due to inbreeding, which can lead to birth defects and sterility, eventually cause extinction. If inbreeding does depress the mountain lion population in the Santa Monica Mountains, there's a 99.7% chance of extinction within 50 years, a joint study between UCLA and the National Park Service predicted in 2016.

Executive Officer and Architect for the Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains Clark Stevens, who spearheaded the crossing’s design in its first two stages, tells the story of the animal that catalyzed support for the Liberty Canyon project: a young lion coming from the San Gabriel mountains.

Stevens describes the lion as the perfect lion — young, healthy and most importantly, genetically distinct from Santa Monica’s other mountains. Against the odds, he crossed the 5 freeway, the 118 freeway, and was almost all the way across the 101 when he hit a fence he couldn’t scale. He backed up to jump over it and was struck and killed by a car in the right lane.

“It really only takes one new animal coming in, male or female, to the Santa Monica Mountains and breeding to maintain the level [of biodiversity],” Stevens said. “If you do better than one new animal every two years, breeding, then the genetics starts to improve, your biodiversity starts to go back up, it’s healthier.”

'Last, Best Place' For A Crossing

According to Stevens, the Liberty Canyon location is the last, best place for a wildlife crossing overpass. It’s the one spot where there’s undeveloped public land on both sides and only one road to the south — Agoura Road, which will also have a crossing over it by time the project is completed.

The wildlife crossing would connect hundreds of thousands of acres on each side, Stevens said. It's designed to provide passage for a variety of different species. In addition to the 1 acre of land that goes over the freeway, it’s also an 8-acre habitat restoration.

Today, the lion known as P-22 is the face of the project. Unlike the lion from Stevens’s story, P-22 is alive today. He successfully crossed the 101 freeway, but now lives alone in Griffith Park within a moat of busy roads. Pratt says it’s likely he’ll live out the rest of his days as a lonely bachelor.

“That was so relatable for people,” she said. “And they got what our roadways did and why we needed wildlife crossings in a way that all the scientific terms in the world wouldn’t.”

The Liberty Canyon Wildlife Crossing is a practical solution, Pratt said, and one where donors, residents and visitors will be able to see its impact every time they watch animals cross.

“Unlike a lot of [environmental problems], where it’s hard to know what to do, we know how to fix this,” she said. “We know how to right this great wrong that we did. We didn’t know, when we were putting in roads, what we were doing to wildlife, but we know now.”