Wildlife corridors integrated into urban planning enable animal movement between fragmented habitat patches, reducing road mortality, inbreeding and the chronic stress of isolation for urban wildlife populations.
Habitat fragmentation creates chronic welfare costs for wildlife populations by preventing access to seasonal resources, restricting mate choice and forcing road crossings that cause injury and death. Individual animals in fragmented landscapes experience resource stress, failed breeding and elevated mortality from road collisions. Connectivity infrastructure reduces these welfare costs by enabling movement between resource patches and reducing the frequency of dangerous road crossings. For species like hedgehogs, simply opening garden fence gaps to enable movement prevents road mortality at the individual level while supporting population connectivity at the landscape level. Urban planning that embeds wildlife corridor requirements in development standards converts a welfare problem created by urbanisation into a managed and mitigated one.