Biodiversity All Around Us: Building Habitat Around Infrastructure
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We don’t spend much time thinking about the land around power lines, between roadways or around pipelines and other infrastructure. However, these areas must be managed to enable safe access by utility companies. Our vegetation management specialists work with land managers to provide solutions that help keep landscapes in these areas, called rights-of-way, as biodiverse and healthy as possible, while making it easier and more cost-effective to maintain critical infrastructure. Successful land management efforts can also beautify the landscape and provide habitat to wildlife and pollinators.
Vegetation management in rights of way
Safety is a major concern for managers of shared infrastructure services. For example, utility companies need to keep areas surrounding power lines free from tall and tangled vegetation that can interfere with operating lines or repair work. Highway maintenance departments must keep roadways free of overgrowth and remove vegetation where needed for driver visibility.
There are different ways to manage vegetation in areas like this. Mowing and cutting temporarily clears large areas of vegetation, but plants inevitably grow back. It’s also labor intensive, poses safety risks, and may require repeated mowing every year. Mowing also has implications for ground-nesting birds and other wildlife, including pollinators.
Herbicides are another effective tool and often have the advantage of keeping weeds at bay longer than mowing or cutting. However, if a herbicide is used to eliminate most or all of the vegetation in an area, it may become more hospitable to unwanted plants like invasive weeds, woody plants and trees. Invasive species often grow faster than native ones, crowding them out and creating more maintenance issues in the long run. When invasive species take over, the land also becomes less biodiverse. Where fewer species of plants grow, animals, birds and pollinators don’t have as many options for feeding or shelter. Choosing herbicides that work selectively (products that only control specific nuisance or invasive species) along with selective application techniques are the best option to maintain these areas.
Integrated Vegetation Management (IVM) describes a process that uses a variety of methods — such as mowing, herbicides, biological controls and other practices — to keep managed landscapes like rights of way as healthy, biodiverse and as self-sustaining as possible. Land managers tailor vegetation management practices to best fit each area of land, considering its unique climate and environmental conditions.
Maintaining a thriving landscape
We develop selective herbicides, such as Vastlan herbicide and TerraVue herbicide, following stringent regulatory guidelines for use in an IVM approach that are designed to control unwanted vegetation, while helping native plants thrive. In rights of way, native vegetation typically poses fewer maintenance issues — native plants tend to grow more slowly and not as tall. In some areas, native grasses are also less prone to fire risk than invading grasses, such as cheatgrass. When native vegetation is maintained, these areas can continue to serve as viable, thriving habitats for wildlife and pollinators.
One example of the positive effects of effective right-of-way management is an area in Pennsylvania known as State Gamelands 33 (SGL33). Scientists at Penn State University have been studying this area for more than 60 years, looking at the effects of vegetation management practices on plants and wildlife here. The area is managed with the use of selective herbicides, including products made by Corteva, as well as other IVM practices. Today, it’s teeming with biodiverse plant life, birds, pollinators including monarch butterflies, reptiles and amphibians, small mammals and deer.
Supporting good stewardship and environmental goals
We are working with utility companies and other entities who manage rights of way to support responsible and effective use of herbicides. By promoting good stewardship practices and the principles of IVM, Corteva helps ensure rights of way can be healthy, vital habitats, while the companies we work with have also been able to reduce costs, use less labor and lower their carbon emissions thanks to fewer trips to the field and less mowing. To mow a little more than three acres, 24 gallons of fuel are required, producing carbon emissions of 176.68 lbs./acre.1
By offering land management solutions that treat rights of way as functional parts of our ecosystem, we help protect and enhance biodiversity in environments beyond the farm and around the world. Thanks to integrated decision-making practices, communities enjoy greater natural beauty that poses less interference to the infrastructure we depend on.
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1 Research conducted by Asplundh Tree Expert in support of SGL 33 research