Summary:

Increasing road traffic may destabilise the functioning of these animal populations that require large spaces. Animals that periodically dwell in the vicin-ity of roads may also be unfavourably impacted by the chemical contamination generated by vehicular traffic. Soils, ground cover and water in watering places are particularly susceptible to contamination. In order to enable free migration of wild animals, it is necessary to construct walkways above or under transport routes. To date there have been no attempts to develop appropriate guidelines for the optimisation of engineering parameters of aboveground walkways and ade-quate methods of managing ecoducts.
The detailed scope of camera monitoring of the walkway included the fol-lowing:
- analysis of the species and age structure of wild boars using the walkway,
- analysis of the annual and daily seasonality of migration,
- assessment of the impact of physical factors (noise and light) generated by vehicular traffic on the behaviour of wild animals on the walkway,
Analyses of the registered film sequences have proven that a correctly de-signed, developed and managed aboveground walkway is accepted by animals and ensures continuity of the migration corridor bisected by a transport route with a considerable intensity of traffic. The walkway was used by both big game and small predators. During the analysed year, we observed the migration of more than 6 thousand wild boars. Of decisive importance for were its technical parame-ters and the method of development employed were decisive factors for the func-tionality of the model walkway.