Wildlife corridors connecting habitat fragments allow animals to move, disperse, and find mates, reducing the welfare costs of isolation and resource scarcity that affect fragmented populations.
Habitat corridor provision addresses individual animal welfare by enabling the movement that allows animals to find adequate food, water, mates, and shelter across their natural range. Animals confined to isolated habitat patches experience chronic welfare stressors from resource scarcity when local conditions are inadequate, inability to find mates when local populations become small, and increased aggression from competition within isolated social groups. Road crossings are particularly welfare-significant because they reduce vehicle strikes - deaths that often involve injury followed by hours or days of suffering before either escape or death. Corridor provision is therefore simultaneously a conservation intervention (maintaining genetic diversity) and a welfare intervention (reducing individual animal suffering from isolation and traffic).