Discover how electric power companies’ vegetation management practices create thriving habitats for pollinating insects, showcasing the unexpected win-win scenario for both utility operations and ecological sustainability.
Making Room For Pollinators
Electric power utilities spend quite a bit of money keeping electric rights-of-ways in wide open lanes. These maintenance activities are considered counter to environmental conservation, and include mowing, selective herbicide use, and pruning of trees.
But a recent study by Florida Museum of Natural History scientists suggests that this method of vegetation maintenance might actually be good for pollinating insects. They analyzed 18 rights-of-way in Duke Energy’s power grid and discovered that those sites with the most intensive maintenance programs–where virtually all woody vegetation was removed before it could grow into a mature forest outside of the right-of-way–contained higher abundances and diversities of flowering plants, along with pollinators like bees, beetles, flies, wasps, butterflies and moths.
Mimicking Nature’s Rhythm
Across the millennia, much of the landscape of Florida was interspersed with various habitat types each being burned on a irregular basis by wildfires creating an environment perfect for wildflowers and early successional habitats. Several insect pollinators of concern to Florida are reliant on these landscapes.
But, human development has also broken this natural cycle with wildfires put out as quickly as they start and no opportunity for prescribed burns near homes and businesses. As a result, there are few good existing examples of these early successional habitats. What the researchers found was that the vegetation management practices implemented by utility companies replicate the historic consequences of such wildfire disturbances, thereby providing an alternative habitat for pollinators to flourish.
Conclusion
Interestingly, the results of this study were framed in a way that highlights some of the synergies that exist between utility companies’ operational needs and conservation efforts for pollinating insects. A high-intensity approach to natural infrastructure management in electric rights-of-way can be maintained to help utility companies develop and maintain vibrant pollinator habitats that will result in benefits for the entire landscape. That tug-of-war between the energy sector and beyond is just an example of the way they are combining two inherently conflicting interests for mutual benefit — a case where conservation and infrastructure can converge.
