A much-needed piece of infrastructure is about to start taking shape for wildlife in Los Angeles’ Santa Monica Mountains.

Curbed is reporting that construction for the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, which connects a stretch of protected land along California’s 101 freeway called Liberty Canyon will now officially begin this spring following an increase in the state’s funding for the project recently announced by Governor Gavin Newsom. 

The bridge was originally announced in 2015 and has been amongst the most vocally-supported public works projects in Los Angeles in recent years. The county’s mountain lion population has been shown to be increasingly fragmented and diffuse since 2002 and will now be protected along with other groups of animals thanks to the new 210-foot crossing from architect Robert Rock. 

Rock was selected by the joint National Wildlife Foundation-Caltrans development team to put an end to the high frequency of animal-related collisions that happen about 300,000 times in a given year and have caused a minimum of 24 mountain lion deaths during that time period alone.

“We don’t necessarily need a Yosemite on every block, but we do need to connect these parcels of open space,” The NWF’s Beth Pratt told Curbed. “We need these everywhere.”

The bridge will feature an array of flora from around the area so as to set it apart from similarly well-known structures in places like Australia and Utah. Bridges like the Annenberg accounted for $340 million in the recently-passed infrastructure bill in a sign that animal welfare is something that’s been taken into account more and more as societies everywhere accept their responsibility to protect natural habitats from the encroachment of the built environment. 

A private fundraising effort was behind what is now the largest structure of its kind anywhere in the world.  It is a point of pride for the bridge’s namesake, who pointed to its erection as a potential touchstone for other projects that might one day reduce the possibility of avoidable tragedies that are still daily occurring.

“There's a reason I wanted to support this crossing and issue this challenge: We need to move beyond mere conservation, toward a kind of environmental rejuvenation… It's a way of saying, there are solutions to our deepest ecological challenges, and this is the kind of fresh new thinking that will get us there.”