Grant: Alliance Grants

Roadside Rights-of-Way make up a substantial land area in North American and present a potentially ideal habitat for preserving pollinator communities, if managed appropriately. However, roadside maintenance often involves regular mowing and/or boom spraying to control the spread of invasive plants--practices that are almost certainly harmful to pollinator populations, since they destroy the flowering plants that pollinators rely on for food. Adaptive management activities, such as hydro-seeding with native seeds, may be able to support pollinator populations and be less expensive in the long run than the traditional management practices. This project proposes a landscape-scale experiment on eastern Ontario Rights-of-Way to compare the effects of adaptive vs. traditional management practices on the diversity and abundance of pollinators. The project will inform future Rights-of-Way management and will also create pollinator identification and habitat assessment tools for land managers.