On all but one of the field trips in my Field Ecology course, I take my students to the sorts of places that they have been to before: the beach, the pinelands, the Highlands forest, farms, old fields, streams, salt marshes, suburbs. But on the third trip, after the ones to the campus and to the experimental plots at Hutcheson Forest, we go to a place that is, for all its superficial familiarity, altogether different and exotic. This trip is to America’s deserted empire, what the person who knew it best, ecologist Frank Egler, described as the Right of way Domain. Right-of-way land comprises at least fifty to seventy-five million acres in the United States, an area larger than New England. It is disposed as long strips of property along railroad tracks, roads, and canals; under power lines; and above buried pipelines. Many of these rights-of-way, even those in heavily populated areas, are scarcely ever visited by people—they are cut off from human presence by fences, no-trespassing signs, patrolling police, dense vegetation, and a scarcity of reasons to set foot in them. True, some abandoned rights-of-way have been put to use. The tow-path and adjacent land along the old Delaware–Raritan Canal, which winds its way for many miles through central New Jersey, has become a very long, very narrow, very popular state park. Indeed, this is the park that has helped protect the forest along the Millstone River, which I de-scribed earlier. Hunters love the rights-of-way under power lines, which attract deer and small game. And disused railroad lines have been turned into foot and bike trails in several parts of the country. But many rights-of-way, totaling a huge amount of land, go for months or years without feeling a human step or hearing a human voice. These places are them-selves neither urban nor suburban nor rural; neither settled nor wilder-ness. They are a quintessential part of what author James Howard Kunstler has called “the geography of nowhere.” In my right-of-way trip we start with a boggy strip of land above a transcontinental gas pipeline.
Biogeography of ammonia oxidizers in New England and Gulf of Mexico salt marshes and the potential importance of comammox