Wildlife and Ecosystems

In a recent blog post, the Texas Department of Transportation detailed the lessons learned from a field training exercise the agency conducted for select staff from its West Texas District in April.

[Above photo by TxDOT]

The excursion took TxDOT West Texas environmental project planners and specialists to the Davis Mountains region and included visits to national and state parks, prairie dog towns, Comanche Springs, the University of Texas at Austin McDonald Observatory and other settings for a close-up view of plants, lizards, birds, bats, the spring source for the Edwards Aquifer and more.

That training exercise aimed to foster a deeper comprehension of the resources TxDOT is charged with protecting — as required by law — and how its transportation projects may impact them.

“Getting the opportunity to learn about these resources from experts and see them yourself – versus behind a computer screen – is vital for professional development and improving your job performance as environmental staff,” said Rebekah Dobrasko, TxDOT environmental affairs director, in the blog post. “When we understand this, we are able to provide better input to our project engineers and designers.”

In that vein, TxDOT noted that members of the Mescalero Apache and the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo tribes spoke to the group; sharing their history and the important places, plants, animals and other natural resources revered for their significance.

“This isn’t something we get to experience every day, and it gave me a better understanding of why it is important that we coordinate with these groups for certain projects,” said Holly Brady, a TxDOT environmental planner in Odessa.

That interactivity speaks to TxDOT’s commitment to building relationships with tribes as part of a consultation process guided by the National Historic Preservation Act, the agency explained – a law helps identify and minimize any potential impacts of a project on prehistoric archeological sites, cemeteries and other places of cultural significance.

Meanwhile, the group also visited the “bat-occupied underside” of a bridge on SH 17 over Frazier Canyon. The TxDOT staffers also heard from an official with the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department as part of that visit, with the official explaining the deadly impacts of “White-Nose Syndrome” on hibernating bats, as well as how to TxDOT employees can identify endangered and threatened bat species in Texas.

“The visit to the bridge underpass and the presence of bat communities was an eye-opener,” said Adrian Aguirre, an environmental specialist in El Paso.

He added that the experience highlighted the importance of thorough environmental reports prior to construction and the importance of effective management to minimize a project’s impact on the habitat of protected and endangered species.

“It’s easy to get bogged down in the mundane of our jobs — the changing laws and regulations, redoing project clearances that are affected by these changes, and so on,” added Bridget Dawson, a project planner in TxDOT’s San Antonio office. “This environmental field training course was a grassroots revival of passion for everything that led the TxDOT environmental staff to this profession in the first place — our love for nature and the desire to better understand, protect, and preserve it.”

The Illinois Department of Transportation recently kicked off its statewide mowing campaign, which will continue until August 15; an effort the agency said plays a key role in its pollinator preservation efforts.

[Above photo by Illinois DOT]

During the summer months, the agency said it conducts two primary types of mowing. The first is safety mowing, which occurs directly adjacent to the road as needed. The second and more involved operation is maintenance mowing, which lasts for approximately six weeks – from around July 1 through August 15.

Meanwhile, maintenance mowing encompasses areas next to culverts, ditches, traffic control devices and other structures, while following the Illinois Monarch Project Mowing Guidelines for Pollinators, protecting as much habitat and nectar resources as possible, Illinois DOT noted.

The agency added that its mowing schedule helps to minimize the impact on the traveling public while encouraging pollinator activity that aids in the reproduction of flowers, fruits, and vegetables that are essential to the state’s ecosystem and economy.

Reducing the amount of land maintained and growing pollinator habitat also protects the endangered rusty patched bumble bee and the monarch butterfly, the latter of which is the official state insect of Illinois, the department pointed out.

“Timely, strategic mowing is an essential part of Illinois DOT’s green efforts,” said Omer Osman, the agency’s secretary, in a statement. He added that, in 2020, IDOT joined in the launch of the Illinois Monarch Action Plan as part of the Illinois Monarch Project, a collaborative effort with local and state partners to help ensure the survival and successful migration of monarchs by increasing and protecting habitat.

Roadway mowing operations can also provide other benefits as well in other areas of the country. For example, the Wyoming Department of Transportation recently noted in a 2023 video that while its mowing operations improves visibility for drivers and removes forage, which helps keeps wildlife away from the roads, it also helps with winter highway maintenance needs as well.

“Most of the reason we mow is to help prevent drifting,” explained Carson Morales, a heavy equipment operator for the agency, in that video. “When the grass is high, it gives the snow more places to catch. The wind keeps piling it in there and we can’t do much with it once it gets stuck there.”

The South Carolina Department of Transportation, in collaboration with Dominion Energy and the Town of Sullivan’s Island, recently helped revamp a 2024 utility project to eliminate the need to remove more than 500 palmetto trees.

[Above photo via SCDOT]

After further consideration and with support from SCDOT and the Town of Sullivan’s Island, Dominion Energy has agreed to a new plan that scales back the initial cutting by 269 trees. In addition, SCDOT and Dominion Energy will each contribute to a local non-profit to support the replanting of new palmetto trees and other species on the island.

Nine of the trees that have been classified as historic palmettos will be relocated around Fort Moultrie, the agency added.

“The Palmetto Tree is the State’s tree. It is a symbol of our pride in our community and an iconic representation of what it means to be a South Carolinian,” noted SCDOT Secretary Justin Powell in a statement.

“I’m proud of the work our SCDOT employees did to help navigate the safety issue at hand while ensuring we preserved as many of these historic trees as possible,” he said.

“Sullivan’s Island is where, in 1776, the palmetto earned its place on our flag and in our hearts, so this is a very positive resolution for the island and the state,” added Patrick O’Neil, the town’s mayor. “We greatly appreciate the efforts of Secretary Powell and the SCDOT team for their leadership in achieving it, and we thank Dominion Energy for their engagement and collaboration.”  

State departments of transportation across the country are involved in a host of similar plate and tree preservation efforts.

For example, since mid-2023, a team of landscape architects from the Washington State Department of Transportation has worked with the University of Washington’s Botanic Gardens and Seattle Parks to select and plant native flora and create habitats for wildlife on Foster Island; an area that previously served as a construction zone for the 520 bridge project.

WSDOT noted that its work crews spent the last year moving topsoil, boulders, and trees into the former bridge construction zone – as well building irrigation systems and crushed rock paths to mark trails for park visitors.

Meanwhile, the Texas Department of Transportation is gearing up to support wildflower season along roadways statewide.

The agency has been planting and maintaining wildflowers on highway right of way since the mid-1930s and TxDOT Vegetation Specialist Travis Jez said the agency’s wildflower program works not just in springtime, but throughout the year.

And in Tennessee, a new $3 million-plus state DOT landscaping project will seek to beautify a long stretch of highway in the Chattanooga area.

The Tennessee Department of Transportation said the U.S. 27 landscaping project – awarded to Stansell Electric Company – will include the planting of trees, shrubs, prairie grasses, wildflowers, and a variety of other ground cover crops as well as the installation of an irrigation system.

The Washington State Department of Transportation plans to start work on a new project on July 8 that will help re-establish fish habitat in the Pilchuck River along State Route 92 near Granite Falls.

[Above photo by WSDOT]

The agency said in a statement that this particular project seeks to replace a protected fish habitat made from “woody debris” that recently washed away with a more permanent solution.

Contractor crews working for WSDOT will build log jacks, or groups of four to six logs tied together in a pyramid with an anchor in the middle. The log jacks will be placed along a bend in the Pilchuck River near SR 92 to create natural habitat for fish to rest and hide, increasing fish survival rates as they move through the river.

The Pilchuck River severely eroded its banks in 2009 south of Granite Falls near SR 92, WSDOT said. Over a period of years, that river erosion caused a house to be swept away by the waters and leaving the SR 92 roadway within 40 feet of being completely undermined.

In 2016, WSDOT temporarily rerouted the river to shore up the riverbank and added large pieces of wood in the river to create fish habitat. In the years since, the work successfully protected SR 92, but much of woody debris placed for fish washed away. That’s why this project is installing log jacks in their place, WSDOT said, as those jacks create a more permanent and resilient fish habitat.

The agency said the jacks will be placed in the Pilchuck River in August, when work in the water can take place without harming fish – with the project fully completed by the fall 2024. 

The Tennessee Department of Transportation is helping create habitats for the Monarch Butterfly and other pollinators through the U.S. postal service; mailing packs of milkweed seeds to any state resident who wants to plant the flower that serves as the iconic orange and black insect’s exclusive egg-laying crib.

[Above photo by the Tennessee DOT]

Milkweed naturally grows around the country, but extreme heat and drought have reduced the number of milkweed plants in North America. Fewer milkweed plants mean fewer Monarchs, and fewer Monarchs mean less pollination for all plant life.

Tennessee DOT started Project Milkweed in 2023, “and we had a good response,” said Michael McClanahan, the agency’s transportation manager in the highway beautification office. As the word spread that Tennessee DOT would send free seeds to people to plant in their gardens, the demand for the tiny seeds ramped up, “and it wound up going viral.”

After replenishing their supply of seeds a few times because of overwhelming demand, the agency finally ran out of seeds and had to stop taking orders. Final total: 780,000 packs of milkweed seeds mailed out across Tennessee in 2023.

At 20 seeds per pack, that’s more than 15 million seeds Tennessee DOT spread to all corners of the Volunteer State.

“We knew we had lightning in a bottle,” McClanahan said, with department staffers so busy keeping up with the demand that, “honestly, we’re struggling to do some after-action reporting on it.”

Tennessee DOT restarted the program this June to coincide with National Pollinator Week. Tennessee residents can request one pack of either red milkweed seeds for small gardens or common milkweed seeds for larger areas.

Milkweed is ideally planted in early fall, with the plant usually flowering in July; meaning those sent out 2023 seeds are set to bloom in this year, in 2024. Although the Monarch Butterfly will feed from – and pollinate – a variety of plants that have nectar, the insects seek out milkweed to lay their eggs because the caterpillar that emerges from its egg can only feed on milkweed leaves.

That species of butterfly is also an impressive migrator and it makes an annual winter trek to the mountains of central Mexico in a trip that takes up to four generations of butterflies to complete.

Because of their short life spans, Monarchs will stop along the way, lay eggs, and die, passing a DNA roadmap to their offspring, who will take the baton and continue the trip that their great-grandmothers started.

Entomologists have been sounding the alarm for years that the winter gathering of Monarchs in Mexico are getting smaller. A World Wildlife Fund report estimated the number of Monarchs making the trip in 2023-2024 may have been 59 percent lower than the previous winter.

“They are critically threatened,” Tennessee DOT’s McClanahan said. “This program is something we were able to do that was a little more targeted to what the Monarchs need.”

The agency has been recognized in the past for its efforts to aid pollination. In January, the department received the 2023 Pollinator Roadside Management award from the North American Pollinator Partnership Campaign for its roadside practices.

McClanahan noted that his office usually handles “litter pickup and landscaping, and scenic roads, but this is easily one of the most popular offerings we’ve undertaken. We think it may be one of the largest seeds offerings in the country. It’s just been surprising to us how widespread the interest was among people to do the right things in their gardens.”

A recent Illinois Department of Transportation blog post provided an inside look at how the agency manages roadside vegetation along state roads and rest areas – work that is the specialty of Andy Star (above), who joined the agency in 2020 after nearly two decades in the private sector.

[Above photo by the Illinois DOT]

Stahr – a roadside management specialist serving Illinois DOT District 3 – is responsible for managing all the off-road, or “roadside,” conditions, in the counties of Dekalb, Kendall, LaSalle, Bureau, Grundy, Livingston, Kankakee, Iroquois, and Ford.

“This typically includes working with the district maintenance yards and deploying our Landscape Section highway maintainers in the management of roadside vegetation as well as man­agement of the rest area facilities and grounds,” he explained in the blog post. “District 3 has approximately 12,000 acres of vegetation to manage and is responsible for eight interstate rest area buildings.”

Stahr said vegetation management tasks include overseeing the implementation of mowing policy; the agency’s herbicide spraying program; and the installation of new turf, pollinator plantings or landscape plantings.

“An argument could be made that the most important impact of the work I do, in the big picture anyway, is the creation, enhancement and preservation of pollinator and prairie habitats along Illinois DOT rights of way,” he said.

“However, the most important and direct impact of my work to the traveling public is more likely keeping the rest areas open and functioning properly,” Stahr noted.

“Doing so provides a safe space for travelers to stop and rest. These facilities also provide shelter to travelers in times of severe weather. The buildings have provided a safe place for drivers during tornado-like conditions,” he explained. “We’ve also heard from truck drivers that the rest areas have literally saved their lives by providing a warm place to shelter when their truck broke down in the dead of winter and nobody can get to them due to bad road conditions.”

Sthar is a U.S. Army veteran and University of Illinois graduate with a bachelor’s in landscape architecture. While in college, he was selected as one of 17 students on a project team to travel to Agra, India, for a site visit. “We spent two and a half weeks in India and spent the semester designing a tourism corridor around the Taj Mahal,” he noted.

Following school, Stahr worked for a multidisciplinary engineering and architecture firm in multiple professional design disciplines – work experience he said “opened my eyes” to the complex nature of development projects.

“Whether it’s a new retail store or a roadway project, it takes a team of professionals to successfully complete these projects,” he said. “In the years before I joined Illinois DOT, I worked for an ecological restoration firm. That experience prepared me for vegetation management and gave me a thorough understanding of how to design, install, and maintain native plantings and pollinator sites successfully.”

The Tennessee Department of Transportation received the 2023 Pollinator Roadside Management Award from the North American Pollinator Partnership Campaign for its efforts to enact pollinator-friendly roadside practices statewide.

[Above photo by the Tennessee DOT]

The North American Pollinator Partnership Campaign is one of the largest non-profits in the world dedicated to the protection and promotion of pollinators and their ecosystems.

The organization said it recognized Tennessee DOT for its roadside efforts – alongside those of the Partners for Pollinators Working Group – for improving Tennessee’s roadside maintenance practices. Additionally, both the agency and the Working Group were lauded for their public education efforts and pursuit of partnerships to make an ecological impact.

The Tennessee DOT’s Pollinator Habitat Program and the Partners for Pollinators Working Group is a partnership founded in 2019 between four state agencies – Tennessee DOT, along with the Department of Environment & Conservation, Agriculture, and the Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency – that also includes state universities and nonprofit partners.

“Pollinators are vitally important to Tennessee’s agriculture and economy,” explained Tennessee DOT Commissioner Butch Eley in a statement. “[We are] proud of the work we’ve done, and the work of our partners, in bringing about better management of roadsides and informing the public about the critical threat to pollinators.”

The Tennessee DOT also noted it recently fulfilled all of its initial milkweed seed orders for the inaugural year of Project Milkweed. That project – launched in June 2023 – is a mail-order resource aimed at restoring landscapes and preserving habitats for monarch butterflies and other pollinator species statewide.

The agency said it distributed a total of 779,601 Red Milkweed and Common Milkweed seed packets statewide as of December 27, 2023; fulfilling orders placed by 130,903 state residents.

Tennessee DOT said Project Milkweed will return in June 2024 with another 250,000 milkweed seed packets available free for state residents upon request.