Roadside vegetation is regularly cut down to prevent excessive growth and to ensure traffic safety. This project demonstrates the potential of roadside mowing with collection to extract biogas energy and promote biodiversity along roads. The goal is to investigate how roadside maintenance can be adjusted to increase the environmental performance of these areas and their operation and move towards a fossil-free transport system, via production of biogas and digestate from roadside grass vegetation.

The project evaluated roadside mowing techniques, quantified energy content of biogas in collected grass, analysed climate impact and biodiversity effects, as well as quality requirements of biogas plants for roadside biomass. A specific mowing technique using rotary mower with collection of biomass was employed.
In total, 156 tons of roadside grass with 25% DM were delivered to a biogas production facility. The biogas producer assessed the grass material as sufficiently clean in terms of debris and heavy metal content. Analysis of energy use indicates significant potential to reduce fossil carbon dioxide emissions. Calculations show that using grass for vehicle biogas and digestate production is about 4.3 times more efficient than just mowing it without collection, from a climate gas perspective, when yields range from 0.5 to 1.75 tons of dry matter per hectare of roadside.

Literature suggests that continuous mowing with collection has the potential to increase biodiversity, particularly in terms of vascular plant diversity. Short-term inventories conducted in this project, however, showed no clear effects on biodiversity after two seasons of mowing, with collection of vegetation.

Linear Transportation Infrastructures (LTIs) are established drivers of habitat fragmentation and barrier effects. Yet, they represent an increasing surface of managed semi natural habitats where increased consideration of biodiversity outputs is needed in an era of global biodiversity decline. A combined effort by both scientists and stakeholders is therefore needed to evaluate the promises and limits of these alternatives, so that they best achieve their conservation potential. Our study explores the effects of forest powerline rights-of-way on biodiversity, as well as potential benefits from their alternative management. These durable methods are based on natural habitats restoration, local edge species replanting, and use for agro-pastoral activities in accordance of security issues of electricity transport.
40 sites in power line rights-of-way and adjacent forests were studied in two France regions: Landes and Ardennes in 2021, for a total of 117 nights of recording.
Results suggest that power line rights-of-ways represent increased movement opportunities for bats and most particularly edge-foraging species. They also provide suitable habitats for bush-cricket species, particularly species requiring thermophilic conditions. No direct benefit from clearings’ alternative management practices on bat communities was detected. However, bush cricket communities appeared richer, more acoustically active and statistically different from adjacent forests in rights-of-way favoring secondary vegetation as compared to clear-cut ones. This collaborative study provides data on understudied taxa in the context of LTIs and shed light on conservation promises and limits associated with their management.

The flora and fauna in railway environments often form unique assemblages of species. These nature types of the railway form something similar to the species-rich meadows of the agricultural landscape, similar to the herbaceous coastal meadows and similar to the sand steppe. But it is something unique. These are our species-rich railway habitats. Among the 1,400 Swedish railway stations, a majority has been surveyed for biodiversity potential. The results include a list of more than 2,000 species of insects and vascular plants having their habitat in dry grassland patches in railway areas. The list includes approximately 100 red-listed species, mainly bees, beetles, butterflies, and vascular plants. High-ranked railway stations are subject to specific biodiversity management plants, a system present since 2018 but still under construction on a national level. The conservation efforts aim at preserving and developing the most important and unique railway habitats. An example is the herb Herniaria glabra, common in dry and sunny sand soils. In railway habitats sun-exposed dense patches of Herniaria glabra are preserved and thereby provide a habitat for rare and monophagous butterflies that are fully depending on railway habitats as they cannot form viable populations elsewhere.

The global expansion of road networks, projected to increase by 25 million kilometres by 2050 (Dulac 2013), raises significant ecological concerns including habitat loss, pollution, and wildlife mortality (Forman et al. 2003). Urban planners and decision-makers must comply with biodiversity protection regulations (Collaboration for Environmental Evidence 2022), and are interested in the role played by roadsides in mitigating road impacts.. However, enhancing road verges' capacity to provide ecosystem services (ES) is challenging due to knowledge gaps in sustainable management (Phillips et al. 2020).
Sustainable road verge management requires considering ecological, social, and economic factors (Bautista Rodriguez et al. 2018, Marche et al, 2021). Transitioning towards sustainability involves acknowledging current shortcomings and exploring alternative approaches (Phillips, 2021). Despite positive stakeholder attitudes towards sustainability, there's a lack of detailed descriptions of current operational practices.
This study aims to enhance our understanding of how roadside managers organize maintenance within their territories, aiming to identify strategies for sustainable roadside management. A qualitative and quantitative survey targeted territory and roadside planners at the department level in France, obtaining data from 27 out of 95 departments. Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) and Hierarchical Ascending Classification (HAC) were utilized to identify patterns in roadside mowing practices. Four distinct mowing patterns were identified and compared to sustainability recommendations provided by public authorities to pinpoint paths towards sustainability.

The Swiss Biodiversity Strategy was adopted by the Federal Council in 2012. The aim of the strategy is the long-term conservation and promotion of biodiversity in Switzerland.

In the area of transport infrastructure, the following strategic goals have been defined:
- Avoidance of new fragmentation;
- improving the permeability for wild animals;
- implementation of the legally prescribed restoration and compensation measures;
- promotion of biodiversity on infrastructure embankments;
- control of invasive neophytes.

Green areas along roads can harbor valuable habitats for plants and animals and contribute to the connectivity of habitats in the landscape. To ensure these conditions and functions over a long period of time and to maximize biodiversity and ecosystem services, appropriate maintenance is essential.

Due to the large area and the great ecological and structural diversity of these roadside green areas, measures to promote biodiversity and the corresponding resources for maintenance should be concentrated on those areas that can already be considered valuable or have great potential for upgrading. To this end, FEDRO intended to draw up an overview of the quality of its green areas and use this as a basis for classifying 20% as biodiversity hotspots. The next step was the planning of measures to achieve the specific objectives for each biodiversity focus area.

The presentation provides an overview of the work carried out, the assessment of the biodiversity focus areas and the planned measures.

The most widespread management of vegetation in forest trenches opened to pass electricity transmission lines (by rotary-slashing) leads to a simplification of their vegetation cover. However, taking advantage of the ecological potential of these rights-of-way (ROW) can help combat the decline of biodiversity: actions to restore habitats, safeguard species, maintain connectivity.
In France, the forests crossed by power lines belong to various types of owners: State, local authorities and public establishments, individuals and companies. Comprehensive analysis of the legal framework shows that there is no particular obstacle to the ecological use of forest ROW by both public and private owners. The national electricity transmission operator (RTE) seems rather receptive to initiatives in this direction. This means that until now, it is the landowners’ involvement that has remained modest.
Today, we observe that a new type of silviculturists is appearing, more concerned with preserving or restoring the ecological functions of forests. Their groups are capable of diagnosing the ecological potential of forest ROW, and even of designing, carrying out and managing projects, which constitutes a new deal. Furthermore, regarding public policies in favor of biodiversity, it would seem relevant to integrate forest ROW into the reconstitution of green networks. Last, climate change increases the vulnerability of forests to fires and one can anticipate that Civil Security will become an important stakeholder in the ecological management of power line ROW in forest.

Scientific studies often identify land use as important factors for the occurrence of deer vehicle collisions (DVC). This leads to the assumption that also the type of crop might have an influence due to its attractiveness, as well as its influence on the visibility of animals in the road environment. For the first time, area-specific data on the dominant crop for the years 2021 and 2022 is available for Baden-Württemberg. The data divides 156 crops into 16 crop types.
Within 100 m, as well as 200 m radius around DVC and control points the crop types ‘permanent grassland’ and ‘cereal’ were represented with the greatest area coverage. The statistical analysis identified the maximum growth height and attractiveness of the crop with the greatest coverage within a 100 m radius as significantly influential factors on the probability of DVC. In addition, the significant interaction between height and month suggests a temporal influence.
Data on sowing and harvesting, as well as crop rotations within one year, would be desirable. The present results could help to better understand the influence of crops on DVC and to select appropriate prevention measures.

Road construction causes native vegetation loss in the surrounding areas, primarily driven by the initial road opening leading to local deforestation. Despite predictions of accelerated deforestation due to road paving, extending native vegetation losses to increasing distances, this expectation remains untested. Our aim was to understand the patterns of change in native vegetation after the paving of Federal roads in all biomes in Brazil. We used a Before-After-Gradient sampling design, using five-years frames (before and after) and six distance zones (1 to 15km from the road) to compare the accumulative rates of native vegetation change over time using GAM models. We observed a significant difference in the accumulative rate of change in native vegetation before and after paving, as well as differences between biomes. Zonation of the effects related to before and after the paving differed between biomes and within biomes and distances. Investigating the landscape at different distance scales is crucial to identifying changes while assessing the full spatial context. Our study demonstrates that post-paving vegetation conversion is not negligible, showing heterogeneity across different biomes and distances from the road. The pavement on the road appears to initiate a new cycle of vegetation conversion. Although the avoidance of the “first cut” still should be the mitigation priority for preventing road impacts on environmentally valued areas, a greater attention should be given to the impacts of paving projects on habitat loss during their permitting process.