BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Ecol. Evol.
Sec. Conservation and Restoration Ecology
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fevo.2025.1637239
Assessing the effectiveness of bridge grate and pipe cattle guard designed to mitigate ocelot road mortality on Texas state highway
Provisionally accepted
- 1The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Brownsville, United States
- 2Texas Department of Transportation, Austin, United States
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The mitigated and fenced section of State Highway 100, extending from Laguna Vista to Los Fresnos, includes five wildlife crossing structures and 16 modified cattle guards (also called wildlife guards) installed to mitigate ocelot road mortality. Bridge grate and pipe wildlife guards were deployed at vehicle entries, and we evaluated their effectiveness in preventing meso-carnivores and ungulates from entering the roadway through the fence gaps from April 2020 to 2024. Wildlife guards collectively were >82% effective in repelling ungulate attempts to enter the roadway, while only 16.64% of meso-carnivore attempts were repelled. The pipe wildlife guard (PWG) design repelled 86.79% of ungulates and 18.83% of meso-carnivore attempts to enter the roadway. In comparison, the bridge grate wildlife guard (BGWG) design repelled 81.51% of ungulates and 15.81% of meso-carnivores. Our results indicate that PWG and BGWG effectively prevented ungulates from entering the roadway through fence gaps. Although both PWG and BGWG had low repulsion rates for meso-carnivores, PWG was found to be more effective at preventing meso-carnivores from entering the roadway.
Keywords: Ocelot, Wildlife crossings, Fencing, modified cattle guards, Mesocarnivores
Received: 29 May 2025; Accepted: 11 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Maharjan, Young, Ryer, Rahman and Kline. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Richard Kline, richard.kline@utrgv.edu
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