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Abstract. Integrated Vegetation Management, or IVM, is purportedly being used by many right-of-way management organizations across the United States. In many cases, IVM is just a name applied to old management approaches. Yet IVM is more than just a name. It is an in-depth and sophisticated system of information gathering, planning, implementing, reviewing, and improving vegetation management treatments. IVM is used to understand, justify, choose among, selectively apply, and monitor different types of treatments, with an overall goal of eliciting site-specific, ecosystem-sensitive, economically sensible, and socially responsible treatment effects that lead to refined achievement of management objectives. We propose a six-step system to IVM that can act as a framework of activities to aid managers and other related stakeholders in communicating, organizing, and conducting IVM business. Each step produces information that must be integrated into the management system. Our six-step system is consistent with Integrated Pest Management and other IVM-like systems developed in forestry and agriculture. We present an IVM system with some unique perspectives and ideas from the literature, and incorporate information from and experience with the electric utility industry.
Key Words. Right-of-way; vegetation management; management systems; powerline corridors; electric transmission lines; pipelines; highway; railroad.
Rights-of-way (ROWs) can be generally defined as units of land used for transportation. As such, ROWs provide many goods, values, and services important to society. Production of values and services can occur from the ROW itself via the act of transport, such as with the movement of people in cars, trucks, and trains. Benefits of ROWs can accrue from the movement of goods, such as gas, oil, and electricity-these goods hold the benefit, and ROWs are a means of transmitting or distributing them to a place where the direct benefit is secured.
All ROWs are managed with a general goal of providing sale and reliable transport. Managers endeavor to meet this goal by creating corridors that exist in narrowly defined technical and environmental states. In almost all ROW scenarios, active management is needed to create specific vegetation and related environmental conditions. On electric transmission line ROWs, the selective removal of tall-growing trees and promotion of low-growing, relatively stable plant communities composed of grasses, forbs, and shrubs is the common approach to vegetation management. Tall-growing trees can cause...