Rights-of-Way as Habitat
Project Director: Caroline Hernandez, University of Illinois-Chicago
Pollinator populations are declining at an alarming rate across the world even as global agricultural systems become ever more reliant on them for food production. The main drivers causing the depletion of pollinator populations and ecosystems include intense land management, pesticide use, and invasive species. A decline in pollinator abundance has serious implications on food supplies and ecosystems across the world.
The scale of conservation required to address pollinator population declines demands an unprecedented level of coordination across industry sectors, geographies, public and private organizations, and government agencies. The Rights-of-Way as Habitat Working Group (Working Group) is one such effort that engages over 400 organizations across the energy and transportation sectors, conservation community, agricultural industry, academia, and federal and state governments across the U.S. and Canada. The Working Group, hosted by the Energy Resources Center at the University of Illinois Chicago, has grown rapidly over the past seven years and has become a leading resource for owners and managers of professionally-maintained, working landscapes— such as utility corridors, highways, and railroads, oftentimes referred to as rights-of-way (ROW)—who are interested in increasing pollinator-oriented habitat conservation and adopting sustainable integrated vegetation management (IVM) practices.
The Working Group focuses on information dissemination, facilitating cross-sector collaboration across a diverse audience, and managing tool development to support habitat creation and conservation on energy and transportation working landscapes. The Working Group uses these initiatives to educate energy and transportation land managers on Best Management Practices (BMP) for IVM and promote methods to increase native early successional habitat that is beneficial to pollinators. By sharing resources, BMPs, and strategies, Working Group participants can integrate learned activities from their peers into their vegetation management practices, disseminate the information within their own organizations, and systematically create and conserve native habitat along their ROWs.
To further facilitate implementation of pollinator-focused IVM in 2023, the Working Group will host four webinar presentations and roundtable discussions to address key issues related to beneficial vegetation management practices that create and conserve pollinator habitat on ROW. These issues include invasive species management, selection and identification of pollinator-friendly vegetation, communications with landowners and the public, and incorporation of traditional ecological knowledge and Native American land interactions. The Working Group will also send out focused communications to the full Working Group sharing updates on related partner work, collaborative opportunities, research, and updates on meetings and webinars related to pollinator-friendly IVM practices. Furthermore, the Working Group’s website is a clearinghouse for disseminating IVM pollinator-friendly practices to determine and implement the most effective ways to enhance user experience, like integrating methods for searching, sorting, and filtering, and will be maintained and updated to emphasize the tools and resources related to managing habitat on energy and transportation lands.
Achievements
- Monarch Candidate Conservation Agreement with Assurances (CCAA) created
- >850,000 acres of committed habitat for the monarch butterfly
- Best Management Practice (BMP) for rights-of-ways file sharing
- Surveys of IVM buy-in by rights-of-way stakeholders in 2019, 2020, 2021, & 2022
- In-person meetings and webinars
- Geo-spatial Habitat Database
- Pollinator Habitat Scorecard
- Cost-Benefit Task Force to work toward a cost-benefit calculator
- Chicago-focused work group for habitat on ROWs