Initiatives to foster native wildflowers, grasses and shrubs are turning utility corridors into wildlife corridors.

Credit: TRCA.

December 11, 2025

Power lines zig-zag across North America, strung between towers that rise 100 feet or more into the sky. Beneath lie vast swaths of often barren land up to 100 feet wide and stretching for hundreds of miles.

“I think that there’s an incredible opportunity to use these really large tracts of land that cross our landscapes for good,” says Eliza Meyer, program administrator for the Right-of-Way Stewardship Council (ROWSC). Founded in 2013, ROWSC provides accreditation to power companies that work to improve the biodiversity of the land along utility corridors (under power lines or above pipelines).

That’s easier said than done. In order to protect power lines and give access to utility crews to maintain the grid and the electrical power we rely on, the land may well be bulldozed and have herbicide applied to it to clear the right-of-way (ROW) of vegetation.

If vegetation is not managed, disaster can strike. It happened on August 14, 2003, when transmission lines in Ohio brushed against overgrown trees, initiating a cascading reaction that cut power to eight U.S. states and parts of Ontario and Quebec in Canada. At least 11 people died as a result, over 50 million people were left in the dark for up to four days, and it cost several billion dollars in economic losses.

In the aftermath, the U.S. and Canadian governments formed the U.S.-Canada Power Outage Task Force to investigate what went wrong. Their conclusions resulted in reinforced standards regarding vegetation on ROWs.

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“There’s a lot of regulation that dictates what can grow, and how high it can grow,” Meyer says. With this in mind, ROWSC promotes practices that foster low-growing, native vegetation, such as wildflowers, grasses and shrubs. According to Meyer, this type of vegetation not only protects power lines but also creates new habitats for pollinators, small mammals and birds, and helps outcompete non-native vegetation once established.

To date, ROWSC has accredited nine utility companies in North America — seven in the U.S. and two in Canada — for their adherence to vegetation management standards and the biodiversity it has fostered as a result.

While it may seem that utility companies are doing the bulk of the heavy lifting when it comes to rewilding land under power lines, they do have help.

But with so many conservation projects already in progress in the province, finding one on a scale that would work for WWF-Canada was challenging. Until Hamel discovered ROWs, that is.

He says he soon learned, though, why other NGOs and communities had not risen to the challenge — it can be difficult to deal with power companies. “They’ve got tens of thousands of employees,” he says, “and many departments. So when municipalities wanted to start a project under a ROW, it became too complex and everybody just gave up.”

Land, according to Hamel, can be a quagmire of ownership, with perhaps 150 feet or so owned by the power company, another 150 by the municipality, and maybe another section owned privately. It took Hamel and WWF-Canada almost two years of planning before any restoration work could begin in Quebec. But finally it did, in the fall of 2021. In the city of Saint-Constant, a pilot project was launched that removed a little over three hectares of turfgrass from the chosen site. Compost was added to improve soil health, and low-growing native vegetation was planted.

A second pilot project in the municipality of Brossard created a no-mow zone across more than five hectares. “Because most of the time the sites were mowed every two weeks, it was pretty much the same ecosystem,” says Hamel. To study the changes not mowing the ROW made, monitoring was carried out by WWF-Canada during the 2022 and 2023 growing seasons. The results showed that there was twice as much insect diversity throughout the no-mow zone compared to mowed zones. There were more food sources for birds, and plant diversity was 150 percent higher than mowed equivalents.

Next door, in the province of Ontario, the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA) has also worked to change the barren landscape under power lines.

Ironically, bringing a meadow to life under the wires begins much the same way the land was first prepared as a utility corridor — with heavy clearing. Invasive species, woody shrubs and small trees have to be removed, and excavators are often needed to create a flat, firm seedbed so native wildflowers and grasses can take root and thrive long-term.

Then there’s maintenance. “A meadow always wants to become a forest,” says Katie Turnbull, senior project manager of ecosystem management for the TRCA. Encroaching woody shrubs or small tree saplings need to be kept at bay. Historically, deer, bison and other wildlife have shaped and maintained a wild grassland or meadow. They grazed much of the woody vegetation, and brought nutrients to the soil through their droppings, while their hooves stomped and aerated the soil surface.

“We have to mimic those practices, so we look to cut down the vegetation every three to four years,” Turnbull says. This eradicates woody vegetation and eliminates any biomass that has accumulated in the undergrowth.

And it works. Along the Meadoway, pollinators such as the endangered monarch butterfly are attracted to the milkweeds, the only host plant it will consider for its larvae. Native wildflowers such as wild bergamot and perennial sunflowers provide food for songbirds.

In Quebec, says Hamel, the proof that biodiversity is thriving in the ROWs is not what he sees but what he hears.

“I remember riding my bike along the transmission lines,” he says, “I would hear the hum of the electric wire, but instead, now, I hear crickets.”

Scrolling photos courtesy of Toronto and Region Conservation Authority and Pla2na/ Shutterstock.

Jennifer Cole

Jennifer Cole is a freelance writer based in Vancouver, Canada. She writes about everything from sustainable gardening and agriculture to nature and the role climate change is having on our lives and the food we eat.

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