Drive any state highway in America between April and October, and you will pass a mowing crew. They are out in force — orange vests, zero-turn mowers, brush cutters — shaving the roadside shoulders down to a uniform three inches, sometimes twice a month. The result is a strip of scalped turf that looks tidy from the driver's seat and does almost nothing for the ecosystem it replaced.
What most people do not realize is that these roadside corridors represent one of the largest untapped conservation opportunities in the country. State Departments of Transportation manage an estimated 10 to 17 million acres of roadside rights-of-way across the United States. That is more land than the entire National Park Service manages in the lower 48 states. And the vast majority of it is maintained under vegetation management protocols designed in the mid-twentieth century, when the only goals were sight-line safety and aesthetic uniformity.
Those protocols are now actively contributing to an ecological crisis.
The Collapse We Are Ignoring
The numbers are no longer subtle. A nationwide survey of commercial beekeepers found that between June 2024 and February 2025, an average of 62 percent of managed honeybee colonies were lost — over 1.1 million colonies in a single season. That is the most severe decline recorded since systematic data collection began in 2010, and it dramatically exceeds the historical average of 40 to 50 percent annual losses. The western monarch butterfly population saw a 58 percent seasonal decrease in overwintering numbers. Multiple native bumble bee species have experienced significant range contractions over the past two decades. Across the board, U.S. butterfly populations are declining, with most species down more than 50 percent and some by as much as 90 percent.
These are not abstract statistics. Pollinators underpin more than $18 billion in annual U.S. crop revenue, according to the USDA. The National Science Foundation has estimated the broader economic value of insect pollination services at over $34 billion annually. Almonds, apples, blueberries, cherries, tomatoes, pumpkins — all of these depend on the very insects we are systematically depriving of habitat.
The causes of pollinator decline are well documented: habitat loss and fragmentation, pesticide exposure, disease, parasites, and climate disruption. But of these, habitat loss is the one where roadside management could make the most immediate difference — and where the policy failure is most inexcusable.
What We Are Doing Wrong
The standard vegetation management approach at most state DOTs follows a simple formula: mow frequently, mow low, spray herbicide broadly, and plant non-native cool-season turf grasses that green up fast and look uniform. This approach prioritizes aesthetics and ease of maintenance over every other consideration.
Here is what that formula actually produces. Frequent mowing eliminates wildflowers before they can bloom, removing nectar and pollen sources that pollinators depend on. Mowing during peak season destroys active nests of ground-nesting bees, which constitute roughly 70 percent of native bee species. Broadcast herbicide applications kill the very plants that sustain pollinator communities. Non-native turf grasses crowd out native vegetation that evolved alongside local pollinator species over millennia. The result is a biological desert stretching for millions of miles along every highway in America.
The irony is that much of this mowing is not even required by safety standards. The Federal Highway Administration recommends maintaining clear sight lines at intersections and keeping the immediate shoulder passable for emergency stops. That can typically be achieved by mowing a 10- to 15-foot strip adjacent to the travel lane. Everything beyond that — often 30 to 100 feet of right-of-way — is mowed purely out of convention.
Put plainly: we are spending public money to destroy public ecological assets for no reason other than habit.
What the Research Shows
The science on this is not ambiguous. A three-year field study conducted by the Maryland Department of Transportation found that selective herbicide use combined with annual fall mowing — instead of frequent growing-season mowing — significantly increased both floral diversity and bee abundance on roadside plots. Research from the University of Minnesota demonstrated a direct positive link between wildflower presence in roadside ditches and bumblebee populations, concluding that a "more flowers everywhere" approach was both effective and cost-efficient. An Idaho Transportation Department study found greater bee species richness along smaller highways with less intensive management and adjacent natural habitat.
The evidence converges on a set of straightforward recommendations. Reduce mowing frequency outside the safety zone to once per year during the dormant season, or at most twice per year timed to avoid peak bloom periods. Maintain a minimum vegetation height of eight inches to allow wildflowers to complete their life cycle. Replace broadcast herbicide spraying with targeted applications for invasive species only. Establish native seed mixes — grasses, wildflowers, and milkweed — in place of non-native turf. Preserve existing native vegetation wherever it occurs naturally in the right-of-way.
None of this is experimental. These are proven techniques with decades of field data behind them.
The States Getting It Right
A growing number of states are beginning to rethink their approach, and the results are instructive.
Minnesota established its Highways for Habitat Program in 2025, integrating pollinator and wildlife habitat enhancement into statewide vegetation management standards. Virginia DOT planned 135 new acres of pollinator habitat installations in 2024, citing both environmental benefits and cost savings from reduced mowing. The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet received the 2024 Pollinator Roadways award from the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign. Maryland DOT added nearly seven acres of native meadows along roadsides in 2024 and expanded demonstration pollinator gardens at multiple highway sites. Colorado DOT's Integrated Roadside Vegetation Management Program emphasizes native plantings and has incorporated specific monarch butterfly mitigation measures. Tennessee DOT runs a pollinator habitat program that includes distributing free milkweed seeds to residents.
Here in Georgia, the Department of Transportation has partnered with the Georgia Association of Conservation Districts since 2019 to install pollinator habitat sites at rest areas and Welcome Centers across the state. Their goal of planting 175 acres of pollinator gardens across seven districts, while commendable, highlights the scale of the challenge. Georgia DOT manages thousands of miles of roadside right-of-way. A hundred and seventy-five acres, spread across the entire state, barely registers as a rounding error.
The programs that are working share common features: they treat roadsides as ecological infrastructure rather than cosmetic afterthoughts, they measure success in species diversity rather than turf height, and they recognize that reduced mowing is not neglect — it is management.
The Economics Make Sense
One of the most persistent objections to pollinator-friendly roadside management is cost. This objection does not survive contact with the data.
Mowing is expensive. Fuel, labor, equipment maintenance, and the opportunity cost of deploying crews multiple times per season add up to significant line items in every DOT's maintenance budget. Reducing mowing frequency from multiple passes per season to one or two passes per year generates immediate savings. Native plantings, once established, require dramatically less maintenance than turf grass because they are adapted to local soils and climate conditions. They do not need irrigation. They do not need fertilizer. They suppress weeds through natural competition.
The Federal Highway Administration has recognized this economic logic. Section 11528 of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law established a dedicated program to fund pollinator-friendly practices on roadsides and highway rights-of-way, providing up to $2 million annually in grants to state DOTs, tribal governments, and federal land management agencies. The FHWA's 2015 FAST Act already encouraged DOTs to use existing authorities and funding to support pollinator habitat through reduced mowing and integrated vegetation management.
The money is there. The science is there. The federal framework is there. What is often missing is the institutional will to change a mowing schedule that has not been questioned in fifty years.
The Corridor Effect
There is a dimension to this issue that goes beyond individual habitat patches: connectivity. Pollinators need to move across landscapes to find food, mates, and nesting sites. In an increasingly fragmented world — where agricultural monocultures, suburban development, and commercial infrastructure have carved natural habitats into isolated islands — roadside corridors offer something irreplaceable. They are linear. They are continuous. They connect.
A roadside planted with native wildflowers does not just support the pollinators living within it. It serves as a migration corridor, linking fragmented habitat patches and enabling genetic exchange between populations that would otherwise be isolated. For monarch butterflies — which migrate thousands of miles between Mexico and the northern United States — roadside milkweed is not a luxury. It is survival infrastructure.
Researchers have described these connected roadside habitats as "pollinator highways," and the metaphor is apt. The same infrastructure we built to move vehicles across the continent could simultaneously move ecological life through it — if we stop mowing it into submission.
What Needs to Change
We at the EPR Foundation believe the path forward requires action at three levels.
At the state level, every DOT should adopt an integrated roadside vegetation management plan that treats pollinator habitat as a primary objective alongside safety. Mowing schedules should be driven by ecological data, not institutional inertia. Native seed mixes should replace non-native turf in all new plantings and in restoration of degraded shoulders.
At the county level, local road agencies — which manage over 740,000 acres of roadside right-of-way nationally — should implement reduced mowing protocols for rural roads where safety sight-line requirements are minimal. County commissioners should understand that the wildflowers along a rural route are not weeds. They are infrastructure.
At the community level, public perception needs to shift. Surveys consistently show that people prefer wildflower meadows to frequently mowed turf once they understand the purpose. But that understanding requires communication. "No Mow" signs and interpretive markers along pollinator corridors are cheap, effective tools for building public support.
The challenge here is not scientific. It is not economic. It is cultural. We have spent decades equating "mowed" with "maintained" and "wild" with "neglected." That equation is wrong, and the pollinators are paying the price.
Seventeen million acres of roadside right-of-way. Sixty-two percent honeybee colony losses in a single season. Over $18 billion in crop pollination at stake. The math is not complicated. What we are mowing down is worth more alive than dead.
Every highway in America is a potential pollinator corridor. The question is whether we will keep treating our roadsides as landscaping — or start treating them as the ecological lifelines they could be.