Wild Ones Green Bay Chapter is starting a letter writing campaign to the Wisconsin DOT offices in Brown County and Madison to promote the use of native plants in highway roadsides, and I need all of your help! Please pass this information along to everyone you know that might write in. Wisconsin Native Roadside Vegetation campaign Want to see more native plants along Wisconsin’s roadways? Here’s how you can help… This is where you can make an impact: We need individuals to write letters encouraging the WisDOT to plant natives along roadsides and right of ways in order to increase the pollinator populations in Wisconsin. The Friends of the Monarch Trail were successful in convincing the DOT to amend the seed mix for restoring the ZOO interchange in Milwaukee County! The WisDOT will plant a standard native mix and enhance it with 10% common milkweed to help the monarch migration. This was possible with letters and participation from many Friends of the Monarch Trail members and environmental groups. We can expand this program in Wisconsin—Iowa now requires 90% of all new roadway projects to plant native species. We can learn from our neighboring state and help offset the increasing losses of our pollinators. This is a win win for Wisconsin. WisDOT welcomes project comments/suggestions! • Benefits of Native Vegetation on Roadsides • The opportunity to present residents and visitors with a more attractive and authentic view of our state by fostering native plant roadsides might be reason enough for making the investment. There are, however, a host of other benefits that will derive from the conversion to native vegetation, including the following: • Enhance Wisconsin’s natural beauty and restore native habitats that protect pollinators which are such an important link in the web of life. • Native plants are perennial. That along with their deep root structure makes them drought-resistant and long-lived with little or no maintenance once they have reached a certain level of maturity. • Because of their deep root structure, native plants will reduce erosion of soils and increase filtration of runoff into our aquifers. • Reduce budget costs by reducing reliance on fossil fuels and maintenance of equipment by reducing mowing on the highway system. • Reduce long-term herbicide use while at the same time controlling invasive plants. • Restore the historical heritage of our roadsides. • Structural integrity can serve to reduce snowdrift, improving safety and snowplowing costs. • Native plants sequester carbon and store it safely in their deep root systems reducing greenhouse gases. • Besides being beautiful and abundantly diverse, native plantings provide wildlife habitat. • Balancing the Costs and Benefits • Native grass and wildflower seed does cost more per acre than typical turfgrass seed. Seeds of certain species with a limited distribution may be particularly expensive. One way to reduce costs is to harvest seeds from established stands of grasses or wildflowers. Limited amounts of seed can be harvested in the fall by hand, with the help of volunteers, or sometimes through the use of farming equipment. Another advantage of collecting seed locally is that local ecotypes may be well adapted to the area. • Even with the higher costs of seeds and planting, managing roadsides with native vegetation may ultimately be more cost effective. Management of powerline rights-of- way through native plantings along with selective use of herbicides and manual removal of woody plants, rather than repeated mowing and blanket herbicide use, reduces maintenance costs (Russell et al. 2005). Roadsides planted with native grasses and forbs should, after establishment, have less erosion as well as reduced need for mowing and spraying of herbicides, which may provide savings (Steven Holland, Iowa DOT, pers. comm.). In 1987, Massachusetts’ Department of Public Works spent about $330 per acre to mow roadside turf six times; for every acre managed instead as wildflowers, nearly $280 could be saved by a reduction in mowing (Platt et al. 1994). Write to: Wisconsin Department of Transportation Northeast Region 944 Vanderperren Way Green Bay, WI 54304 US 41 Brown County Project Office 1940 West Mason Street Green Bay, WI 54303 Mike King, US 41 / WIS 441 Projects Group Construction Supervisor Phone: (920) 492-2244 E-mail: [email protected] WIS 29 (County FF-County U) Freeway Conversion - Contacts Jeremy Ashauer, P.E., WisDOT Project Manager (920) 492-4165 [email protected] Hill Farms State Transportation Building 4802 Sheboygan Ave. P.O. Box 7910 Madison, WI 53707-7910
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 20:53:26 +0000
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