Audubon of Kansas features one or more roadside wildflowers each week during the growing season, and other roadside vegetation views and values at other seasons of the year.

We are featuring plants that add aesthetic interest and color to roadside vegetation in Kansas, Nebraska and other prairie and plains states.  Hundreds of thousands of acres of vegetated roadsides along tens of thousands of miles of rural roads (from Interstates to township roads) also have the potential of contributing to the ecological diversity of landscapes.  It is important to look at the roadside landscape through the eyes of a visiting child new to the countryside or the eyes of an elder who remembers when every country road was a display of nature’s beauty and diversity. 

Also, we should try to imagine how these habitats complement the surrounding landscape and how they can be used by nesting Bobwhite Quail and Meadowlarks, or by Monarch Butterflies and other pollinators as they strive to continue to exist.  In some intensively cultivated landscapes, the only place remaining for potentially undisturbed habitat is within the roadsides.

Depending on seeding mixtures and maintenance practices employed, these same roadside areas can serve as a source for invasive plants (including bromegrass, old world bluestems, tall fescue, reed canary grass and crown vetch) that crowd out native plants on adjacent lands; as a “death trap” areas for birds and butterflies that use roadsides as nesting/egg laying habitat only to have it shredded by mowers; and, as a drain on public financial resources expended on mowing and spraying herbicides on roadside vegetation.

The Kansas Department of Transportation (KDOT) is responsible for managing 150,000 acres of vegetated rights-of-way along our state’s 10,000-mile system of state highways. KDOT has responsibility for more acres of publicly-owned “grassland” than any other governmental or private entity. This public land is many times the size of the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve and is viewed by hundreds of thousands of residents and visitors traveling in the state—a Prairie State—each and every day.

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This website project is designed, in part, to encourage KDOT to stay on the agency’s relatively new course of integrated roadside vegetative management, and help build public awareness and support for the tremendous resource of native plants (and associated wildlife) along KDOT, Kansas Turnpike, county and township roads.  We are hopeful that we can also help to build support for progressive roadside management practices demonstrated in other states.  The Nebraska Department of Roads was an early leader in the use of native grasses and wildflowers, and Audubon recognized the Department with an award in 1972.  County Conservation Commissions in Iowa have demonstrated great achievements along county roadsides to restore a semblance of that state’s rich heritage of tallgrass prairie plant community.

Audubon of Kansas has long been a tireless advocate for establishment of aesthetically pleasing and ecologically–friendly strategies of roadside management in the Great Plains and prairie states.