Landscape characteristics of a stream and wetland mitigation banking program (original) (raw)
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Current stream restoration science is not adequate to assume high rates of success in recovering ecosystem functional integrity. The physical scale of most stream restoration projects is insufficient because watershed land use controls ambient water quality and hydrology, and land use surrounding many restoration projects at the time of their construction, or in the future, do not provide sufficient conditions for functional integrity recovery. Reach scale channel restoration or modification has limited benefits within the broader landscape context. Physical habitat variables are often the basis for indicating success, but are now increasingly seen as poor surrogates for actual biological function; the assumption ''if you build it they will come'' lacks support of empirical studies. If stream restoration is to play a continued role in compensatory mitigation under the United States Clean Water Act, then significant policy changes are needed to adapt to the limitations of restoration science and the social environment under which most projects are constructed. When used for compensatory mitiga-tion, stream restoration should be held to effectiveness standards for actual and measurable physical, chemical, or biological functional improvement. To achieve improved mitigation results, greater flexibility may be required for the location and funding of restoration projects, the size of projects, and the restoration process itself.
Environmental Science & Policy, 2011
In 2008, federal regulators issued formal regulations governing wetland and stream mitigation in an effort to improve ecological quality and reduce uncertainty during the mitigation process. In this article, we explore how the federal regulations (“the Rule”) reduce compliance risks assumed by regulators when issuing permits that require wetland and stream mitigation under the U.S. Clean Water Act. Regulatory risk involves the timeliness and adequacy of mitigation provided for permitted impacts. The Rule attempts to accomplish this by requiring more consistent implementation of compensatory mitigation projects in general, largely through a series of provisions that create equivalent ecological and mitigation standards for all sources of mitigation (mitigation banks, permittees and in-lieu fee programs). Between April–May 2009, we administered a national, web-based survey of mitigation bankers and other mitigation professionals (N = 156 responses; 47.7% response rate). Our results reveal banker perceptions that several Corps districts have incompletely implemented equivalent standards, and therefore a variety of barriers to abating regulatory risk continue to exist 1 year after the regulations took effect. Qualitative analysis of respondent comments revealed the reasoning behind these perceptions, including perceptions that regulatory conflicts of interest involving close relationships with in-lieu fee (ILF) programs, as well as regulatory preference for NGO and government sponsored mitigation. Based on our results, it appears that Rule clarification may be necessary to further reduce regulatory uncertainty and promote high quality compensation.
Environmental Management, 2011
The U.S. Clean Water Act requires compensatory mitigation for wetland and stream damage through restoration of damaged aquatic ecosystems. We evaluate the North Carolina’s Ecosystem Enhancement Program (EEP), a state agency responsible for compensatory mitigation. We compare communities gaining and losing aquatic resources during mitigation, finding new types of socioeconomic disparities that contradict previous studies of mitigation program behavior. We find average distances between impact and mitigation sites for streams (43.53 km) and wetlands (50.3 km) to be larger in North Carolina than in off-site mitigation programs in other regions previously studied. We also find that aquatic resources in the State are lost from urbanized areas that are more affluent, white, and highly educated, and mitigated at sites in rural areas that are less affluent, less well educated, and have a higher percentage of minorities. We also analyze the relationship between urban growth indicators and EEP accumulation of compensation sites. Growth indicators and long-term population projections are uncorrelated with both projected transportation impacts and advance mitigation acquired by the EEP, suggesting that growth considerations can be more effectively incorporated into the EEP’s planning process. We explore the possibility that spatial mismatches could develop between watersheds that are rapidly growing and those that are gaining mitigation. We make recommendations for ways that regulators incorporate growth indicators into the mitigation planning process.
Since 1996, the watershed approach (i.e., the inclusive use of watershed information) has been a hallmark concept in ecosystem restoration site location. In 2008, federal regulators required use of the watershed approach in siting compensatory mitigation for aquatic impacts regulated under the U.S. Clean Water Act. However, regulations fell short of requiring full watershed plans, which could have required stakeholder involvement and inter-institutional coordination. Little work has evaluated how the watershed approach or planning position mitigation sites in the landscape. Has the watershed approach or watershed planning been successful in targeting restoration sites where they are needed? The North Carolina Division of Mitigation Services (DMS; formerly the NC Ecosystem Enhancement Program), a state agency, has implemented the watershed approach and extensive watershed planning to focus restoration investments. Through a multi-step planning program, the DMS employs a watershed approach to gauge the need of 12-digit watersheds for restoration. In some cases, an intensive local watershed planning process follows this targeting effort. We tested the effect of the program's watershed targeting approach (n = 710) and local watershed planning efforts (n = 147) on increasing the frequency of wetland and stream mitigation projects (n = 480) in each of the state's 1741 12-digit watersheds (1998–2012). We find that while the watershed approach is successful at guiding restoration to targeted watersheds over space and time, the impacts of watershed planning are more nebulous, with important but weaker panel-effects. Our findings highlight the importance of plan quality and data management in using a watershed approach to target restoration sites effectively.
Determinants of spatial and temporal patterns in compensatory wetland mitigation
Environmental Management, 2007
Development projects that impact wetlands commonly require compensatory mitigation, usually through creation or restoration of wetlands on or off the project site. Over the last decade, federal support has increased for third-party off-site mitigation methods. At the same time, regulators have lowered the minimum impact size that triggers the requirement for compensatory mitigation. Few studies have examined the aggregate impact of individual wetland mitigation projects. No previous study has compared the choice of mitigation method by regulatory agency or development size. We analyze 1058 locally and federally permitted wetland mitigation transactions in the Chicago region between 1993 and 2004. We show that decreasing mitigation thresholds have had striking effects on the methods and spatial distribution of wetland mitigation. In particular, the observed increase in mitigation bank use is driven largely by the needs of the smallest impacts. Conversely, throughout the time period studied, large developments have rarely used mitigation banking, and have been relatively unaffected by changing regulatory focus and banking industry growth. We surmise that small developments lack the scale economies necessary for feasible permittee responsible mitigation. Finally, we compare the rates at which compensation required by both county and federal regulators is performed across major watershed boundaries. We show that local regulations prohibiting cross-county mitigation lead to higher levels of crosswatershed mitigation than federal regulations without cross-county prohibitions. Our data suggest that local control over wetland mitigation may prioritize administrative boundaries over hydrologic function in the matter of selecting compensation sites.
Assessing the size and growth of the US wetland and stream compensatory mitigation industry
PLOS ONE
Interest has focused on quantifying the size and scope of environmental markets, particularly those that offset ecosystem impacts or restore natural infrastructure to improve habitat or promote clean air and water. In this paper, we focus on the US wetland and stream compensatory mitigation market, asking: what types of firms make up the mitigation “industry”? What are the economic impacts–i.e., the “size”–of the mitigation industry? How has this industry changed over time? We present the results of a national survey of mitigation firms and construct an input-output model of the industry’s economic impacts and employment. We also develop a comparative, 2014 model of the industry using data from a previous study of the broader, ecological restoration economy. Our findings suggest that the (2019, pre-COVID) mitigation industry collects annual revenues (direct economic impacts) in excess of $3.5 billion, which, along with additional indirect (supply chain) and induced (spillover) econo...
2022
Recent revisions to the definition of the "waters of the United States" (WOTUS) have considerably altered how wetlands are federally regulated under the Clean Water Act. The two most recent modifications to WOTUS, the Clean Water Rule (CWR) and the Navigable Waters Protection Rule (NWPR), represent two opposing approaches to the federal wetland policy. Despite their implementation, the impacts of these rules on the regulation of wetlands have as of yet been poorly characterized at broad spatial scales. Using New York State (NYS) as a case study, we evaluated the jurisdictional statuses of more than 373,000 wetlands under the CWR and the NWPR to assess the landscape-scale effects of WOTUS re-definitions. We found that statewide and within each of NYS's hydrologic regions, the NWPR protects fewer wetlands and less total wetland area than the CWR. The efficacy of the two regulations varied considerably in space across NYS, highlighting the need for comprehensive, nationwide assessments of wetland policy outcomes. We also observed that both rules produced non-uniform patterns in jurisdiction across a range of landscape positions and wetland sizes, preferentially protecting large wetlands close to the stream network. This effect was particularly pronounced under the NWPR, which excludes all geographically isolated wetlands from protection. Our findings in NYS emphasize the existence of unique patterns in protected wetlands across spatial scales, highlighting the value in applying geospatial analyses to evaluate environmental policy.
2013
Prepared for: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 8.April 2013.Includes bibliographical references (pages 106-110).In a comprehensive evaluation of wetland mitigation, the National Research Council (NRC) concluded that the goal of no net loss of wetlands is not being met for wetland functions by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE) and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s mitigation program under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act (CWA). One of the key science recommendations of the NRC was for compensatory mitigation decisions to be made using a watershed approach Acknowledging this conclusion, the ACOE and EPA issued a federal rule in April 2008 to increase the effectiveness of compensatory mitigation and called for setting mitigation decisions in the watershed context. While requiring a watershed-scale view of mitigation, the new rule did not provide guidance on how a watershed approach should be implemented. At that time, Colorado lacked the basic capacit...
On January 1, 2005, a new set of land use regulations (aka The CAO1) was implemented for rural areas by the Metropolitan King County Council in accordance with the 1990 Washington State Growth Management Act (GMA). This provided an opportunity for the U.S. EPA and King County to collaborate on answering a fundamental and often asked but rarely answered question: “Are land use regulations effective at protecting aquatic habitats and associated biological resources?” To address this question for rural areas in King County, the implementation and environmental effectiveness of the County’s land use regulations was evaluated by measuring regulatory compliance and change in land covers and environmental response variables (ERVs) in streams in nine rural watersheds (11,463 acres2), including six treatment watersheds (10,144 acres) where land development was ongoing and three undeveloped, fully-forested reference watersheds (1,320 acres). The Puget Sound’s rural lands are predominantly in ...
Freshwater Science
Watershed restoration for mitigating or preventing impacts of human land use on aquatic ecosystems is now big business and is far more common and consumes far more financial resources than 10 to 20 y ago. The effects of restoration are assumed to be improvements in stream ecosystem integrity. However, there is not conclusive evidence that shows that most watershed restoration and mitigation projects produce expected environmental and biological changes. Here we present and discuss 4 major challenges associated with the planning, execution, and monitoring of large-scale restoration programs aimed at improving the ecosystem integrity of streams (and their downstream rivers and estuaries), with a focus on agricultural best management practices and urban stormwater control measures. These challenges are 1) the lack of holistic planning for implementing and monitoring large-scale restoration projects, 2) planning that does not include geographic context or considerations of scale, 3) a failure to tie monitoring to specific goals and predicted improvements in ecosystems, and 4) the limited and parochial approach to monitoring taken by funding agencies. We propose solutions for these challenges based on experience gained from planning and executing a large-scale program for improving water quality of the Delaware River in eastern North America.