AN AUSTRALIAN ROAD REVIEW.

In November 1999, I was a keynote speaker at an Australian national conference on transport corridor management. Speaking at the conference gave me the opportunity to take a 2,500-kilometer road trip while I was in Australia.

As the roadside vegetation coordinator for the Federal Highway Administration, I was eager to learn why and how Australia appears to do better conservation work on their highway systems, and the conference coordinators made arrangements for me to speak with representatives of the highway departments of New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria and with several shire (county) roadway engineers.

To understand the Australian perspective of vegetation management, you need to know that:

* Australia is a young country with the population of California (about 17 million), and although it is a large country -- only slightly smaller than the contiguous 48 states of the United States -- most of the people live along the coast.

* Like the United States, Australia was primarily settled by Europeans.

* Some of the Australian landscape has been cleared for agricultural purposes.

* Aussies watch and seem to learn from our past.

* Australian state highway departments have the same safety and functional constraints that we do, along with greater fire protection and moving stock concerns.

* In the state Victoria alone, their roadsides contain 25 percent of all their endangered species and 45 percent of their remaining native grasslands.

Because of these facts, their state and county roadsides look much different than ours. In the previously forested regions, the regenerated roadside woodlands are conspicuous. Large trees are allowed to grow closer to the pavement. The Aussies seem to value their "road reserves" and strive to protect roadside environmental integrity.

This article highlights some of my observations.

Roadsides Conservation Advisory Committee

The Roadsides Conservation Advisory Committee (RCAC) is an interagency partnership, which was formed in 1975. Its prime goal is to protect reserves. Road reserves are defined as "the total strip of land reserved for transportation purposes." The reserves include both the road formation and roadsides. This holistic approach includes a look at the travel function, roadside uses, and the surprising abundance of remnant native plant communities within the reserves.

Just like in our country, these "remnants" are not pristine after highway construction. Because the construction happened long ago when adjacent land was not developed, often native seed in the soil and adjacent soils reestablished themselves, reflecting preconstruction plant communities.

To protect these rare plants and wildlife habitats, RCAC developed a vegetation inventory assessment procedure. Once the reserves, including roadsides and rights of way, are inventoried, each segment is rated according to low, medium, or high conservation value. This rating is then matched with an appropriate management plan -- segment by segment.

These ratings are also considered in future construction plans. A high conservation value can mean designing an alternative route to protect the valuable segment.

Consequently, management and construction planning are based on strong, defensible environmental decisions. This is a stronger level of detail than we reach in our own Environmental Impact Statements.

Roadside Handbooks

Roadside handbooks have been written by many states and shires based on RCAC's conservation work. The 32-page handbooks are small, contain many graphics, and provide the basic guidelines for construction and maintenance crews.

The construction instructions include: (1) Keep machinery and stockpiles on cleared land. (2) Avoid tidying up vegetation. (3) Clean down machinery.

Some of the maintenance guidelines are: (1) Enforce the environmental code of practice for workers. (2) Locate firebreaks on cleared land. (3) Use only the machinery best suited to the job.

These common sense guidelines are simple to follow and minimize environmental impacts.

Shires' Emphasis on Environment

County roads -- paved and unpaved -- wind through a pastoral countryside. Adjacent paddocks (pastures) are covered by grazing sheep and only a few trees. These corridors or road reserves stand out in the landscape as linear woodlands.

To protect these savannah-like plant communities along gravel roads, the edge of the land adjacent to the roadway is cut away at a right angle to the road to form a barrier that prevents, or at least discourages, drivers and the operators of maintenance and construction equipment from pulling off the road. This is a rather severe means to prevent soil compaction and plant destruction, but it works! There is never a doubt about where vehicles and equipment can and cannot leave the roadway.

The upgrading of some paved roadways has been cancelled when vegetation inventories have revealed high conservation values -- even in a burgeoning suburb. This level of conservation consciousness is common in Australia. Especially at the county level, the decision-makers and the public care about their environment and want to protect the land. Perhaps they have learned from our experience that failure to protect the environment results in costly problems "down the road."

State Strategic Planning 

After visiting with state departments of transportation in New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria, I concluded that their strategic plans in the area of conservation have been well thought out. The states solicit public input at the district level. They fund handbook production. They work with their shires. They brief contractors in pre-contract meetings.

New South Wales actually requires the replacement of any native vegetation removed or disturbed by construction. In the United States, that requirement pertains only to wetland plant communities -- not to native grasslands or native woodlands. We have some distance to go.

Private Sector Support

Private sector support is very important in Australia, and one of the goals of Greening Australia Inc. is to promote this support. Greening Australia is a conservation group that often takes on the interface role between highway projects and the public. They have been very successful in encouraging community input and in educating the public.

Greening Australia is providing technical assistance and native plants to projects that I visited. One project encourages owners of land adjacent to roads to plant rows of native trees and shrubs on their side of the fence. Another project revegetates abandoned roadways. Greening Australia also cooperates with the states on researching the use of native grasses.

Australia is far ahead of us in protecting and restoring native forest communities. However, they plant seedlings, and when I asked about planting less expensive seed, my hosts reported that no one has taken on field production of native seed. As a result, they are slowed by the time and cost of producing seedlings. This was my principal observation of the progress that we have made in the United States.

The Biolinks Project

This project in western Victoria is located in an arid area. The road network contains quality remnant vegetation. Where missing, native vegetation is being restored to link the corridors between desert areas. These biolinks, or habitat connections, result in grassland and woodland communities alive with birds, some of them endangered species.

A similar project in the United States is called Prairie Passage. This is a partnership of six states that are aiming at one corridor of biodiversity from Texas to Minnesota.

Tourism

Tourism influences some vegetation management decisions. For example, the koala is certainly a worldwide-known critter associated with Australia. They are not rare and endangered. Yet, expensive and not-always- effective koala fencing is constructed along highways. This effort is to protect an animal of touristic value.

Having held a koala, I can report that they are about the size of a raccoon and, therefore, not a great danger to motorists.

In addition, I noted that the city of Ipswich has just hired a consultant to determine the touristic value of natural areas in and around their city. Another city that I visited, Armidale, has built an interpretative complex in a natural area to encourage environmental awareness and "ecotourism."

A Commitment to Conservation

As a tourist in Australia, I appreciated the strong commitment to conservation that I witnessed. Their commitment appears to come from a historical closeness to the land; from a determination to avoid repeating mistakes made in Australia and other countries; from a confidence that Aussies can do better; and from Outside influences, such as the United Nations, which has named a number of Australia's rain forests and the Great Barrier Reef as World Heritage Areas. These preserved natural areas are some of the "best of the best" remaining in the world. The associated pride must reinforce Australia's commitment to conservation.

Bonnie L. Harper-Lore is the vegetation specialist for the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). She is a member of the Water and Ecosystems Team in the Office of Natural Environment. She has managed the Native Wildflower Program since January 1993. She serves on two federal interagency committees: the Federal Interagency Committee on the Management of Noxious and Exotic Weeds (FICMNEW) and the Native Plant Initiative. She has been active in the maintenance and landscape committees of the Transportation Research Board. She recently coauthored Roadside Use of Native Plants, an FHWA handbook, and continues as editor of the quarterly newsletter Greener Roadsides. She has a master's degree in restoration and management of plant communities from the University of Wisconsin at Madison