TALMED Grant Ecological bases for the restoration
of plant cover of motorway
slopes in Mediterranean regions
The severe environmental
impact caused by public works such as roads, railways, canalisations,
quarries, etc., has prompted a strong social opposition. Thus,
there is an urgent need for evaluating and restoring the environmental
damages caused by such works.
However, there is a certain scepticism about the efficiency
of vegetation restoration in roadcuts, in accordance with
the results obtained so far in the Mediterranean Region,
where long periods of drought are associated with intense
rainfall events that produce high erosion rates. The high
losses of seeds by erosion and predation, the high rates
of plant mortality due to drought or nutrient deficiency
and the low ability of many species usually used to expand
their populations are responsible for the bad results obtained
with seed mixtures composed of very few species that proved
to be successful in the rest of Europe. When complements
are added to the seeds in order to avoid these problems,
the economic cost per unit area increases significantly.
The evaluation in TALMED of the species currently used in
roadcut restoration and the selection of new species in
accordance with their morphological and functional characteristics
and their plasticity, under different lithological and climatic
scenarios of the Mediterranean Region, will improve the
efficiency and reduce the costs of vegetal restoration of
roadworks in this region.
Study
of the erosion and the vegetation in a motorway slope
(A3 motorway, Valencia)
View
of gypsum-rich hills in the south of Madrid affected
by the construction of the M-50 motorway. Studies of
ecological restoration are in progress at this site.
The objectives of TALMED are:
A) to produce a list of species
useful for the vegetal restoration of roadcuts that takes
into account the success of commercial species and of the
species that colonizes spontaneously the roadcuts.
B) to identify the morphological and
functional features and the phenotypic plasticity that characterise
the species able to succesfully colonise Mediterranean roadcuts
in order to obtain a predictable model that allows the selection
of species in other environmental conditions.
C) to optimise seed mixtures in a Mediterranean
context where seeding treatments haven’t been successful
so far. In this objective, there will be a link between the
research group and the persons in charge of environmental
protection of the construction company Ferrovial-Agroman.
The degree of innovation of TALMED results from the lack of
investigations that have evaluated the success of seeding
treatments with commercial mixtures. TALMED is relevant not
only because it fills a gap in scientific knowledge in this
field, but also and especially because it establishes a balance
between the social demand (protection and restoration of the
environment) and the offer coming from the administration
and the companies.
TALMED is a grant in collaboration with:
Prof. Dr. Fernando Valladares Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales CSIC .
Serrano 115 dpdo.E-28006 Madrid. Spain
Phone 34 917452500 ext 988120. Fax 34 915640800
e-mail: [email protected]
