What makes a team of researchers go back and risk their necks on the same leg of a busy highway year after year? A Quebec department of transport project that involves "ecologically" managing the plants and shrubs growing along the province's highways, that's what. It's been done in Europe for quite some time. Every year, the department takes care of upkeep on the edges of some 5,000 km of highways, trimming, mowing, clearing and removing brush. It costs close to a million dollars. Yet somehow, cutting all those roadside weeds cut out all the interesting views, too.

While a team of biologists from the Université du Québec at Trois-Rivières studies the effects of "free growth" on plant and wildlife, the chair of landscape and environment at the Université de Montréal is measuring the changes in these newly evolving landscapes, as well as taking the pulse of drivers. More must be known - as much as possible - before the method is applied full-scale.

Université de Montréal researchers first selected 23 observation points along the northbound Henri IV Autoroute at Val-Bélaire, the Félix-Leclerc Autoroute at Cap-Santé and the Jean-Lesage Autoroute near Saint-Hyacinthe, where the transport department has run a pilot eco-management project since 1998 on 2- to 4-kilometer segments. Researchers chose strategic spots such as curves, hills and other naturally eye-catching features. A photographer standing on the shoulder, close to cars speeding past at 100 km per hour, took shots of the landscape. But "the photograph didn't at all correspond to what the drivers were seeing," project co-director Gérald Domon observes. Domon's team then shot videos of the roadside, passing first at low speeds, then at high speed, in both lateral and panoramic views. The shots were then assembled, transferred to computers and analyzed.

Their collection of images allows researchers to measure the speed at which different species of plants, shrubs and flowers grow, and to do simulations. Will our delicate natural flora lose ground to the purple loosestrife, a beautiful but invasive exotic plant, within the next few years? To find the answers, researchers must go on site.

The eco-management project's interest goes well beyond environmental concerns. Slowing down motor vehicles at highway exits, reducing headlight glare and providing windbreaks are just a few ways in which vegetation can make highways safer places to drive.

Does this mean retiring the mowers? No way, says Gérald Domon. In the new upkeep program, machines must be adapted to each separate context. Which means eco-management will not necessarily cost less than traditional clear-cutting.

Researcher: Gérald Domon
Phone: (514) 343-6298
Funding: Ministère des Transports du Québec