01/02/2026
One of the easiest and most beneficial things you can do for your property is daylighting your roads. This south Alabama client wanted help with maintaining their roads and finding areas to incorporate early successional habitat on a newly acquired property. Daylighting does just that. By removing the timber that went all the way to the road edges, we can allow the roads to stay in constant sunlight, allowing them to dry faster after rains and minimizing road work needing to be done. This is also a way to add in very important early successional habitat. After we see what the vegetation response is to this disturbance, next year we will disk the open roadsides before the first frost to encourage a native forb and legume response. These can be easily maintained with regular disturbance, spot treatments with herbicide to mitigate any invasive species, and included in the burn rotations to keep it in a perpetual state of early successional habitat. Early successional habitat provides critical food and cover for all native wildlife species but is often overlooked in landowner activities.
