2021 NAPPC Pollinator Roadside Management Award Winner

Nebraska Department of Transportation (NDOT

The Nebraska Department of Transportation (NDOT) includes environmental stewardship as a goal within its mission statement and seeks to fulfill this commitment by establishing desirable vegetation, managing roadsides, and removing undesirable plants. A Roadside Development and Compliance Unit focuses on an ecoregional approach to these activities to ensure that the agency’s rights-of-way serve as pollinator habitat and are improved as appropriate. Seed mixtures planted off highway shoulders contain nearly 25% native wildflower seed, and NDOT has been working with Nebraska Game and Parks Commission to plant locally adapted high-diversity prairie seed along the 321 mile-long Nebraska Cowboy trail. NDOT has also taken great care to steward small white lady slipper orchid, a very rare orchid pollinated by halictine bees. In the Cowboy Trail project alone, 60 acres and more than 15,000 milkweeds were hand planted. NDOT has also funded University of Nebraska research investigating wildflower islands’ effects on pollinating species and pollinator use of