Urban wildlife corridors enable animal movement through human-dominated landscapes, reducing road mortality, genetic isolation, and the welfare costs of fragmented habitat.
Urban wildlife corridor welfare operates at both the population and individual level. At the individual level, wildlife attempting to cross roads without safe crossing infrastructure face acute mortality risk and the suffering of vehicle collision injuries. At the population level, habitat fragmentation creates isolated subpopulations with reduced genetic diversity, higher inbreeding, and reduced adaptive capacity — diffuse welfare costs distributed across populations. Wildlife crossing infrastructure represents a long-term investment in both welfare and conservation: structures built today reduce mortality and enable genetic exchange for decades. Garden management decisions by individual homeowners — maintaining hedgerows, creating wildlife-friendly gaps in fences, avoiding certain pesticides — collectively create informal corridors that support urban wildlife welfare at low cost.