Investigating Habitat Value in Support of Contaminant Remediation Decisions: Approach (original) (raw)
Related papers
Investigating habitat value to inform contaminant remediation options: Approach
Journal of Environmental Management, 2008
Habitat valuation methods are most often developed and used to prioritize candidate lands for conservation. In this study the intent of habitat valuation was to inform the decision-making process for remediation of chemical contaminants on specific lands or surface water bodies. Methods were developed to summarize dimensions of habitat value for six representative aquatic and terrestrial contaminated sites at the East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP) on the US Department of Energy Oak Ridge Reservation in Oak Ridge, TN, USA. Several general valuation metrics were developed for three broad categories: site use by groups of organisms, site rarity, and use value added from spatial context. Examples of use value metrics are taxa richness, a direct measure of number of species that inhabit an area, complexity of habitat structure, an indirect measure of potential number of species that may use the area, and land use designation, a measure of the length of time that the area will be available for use. Measures of rarity included presence of rare species or communities. Examples of metrics for habitat use value added from spatial context included similarity or complementarity of neighboring habitat patches and presence of habitat corridors. More specific metrics were developed for groups of organisms in contaminated streams, ponds, and terrestrial ecosystems. For each of these metrics, cutoff values for high, medium, and low habitat value were suggested, based on available information on distributions of organisms and landscape features, as well as habitat use information. A companion paper describes the implementation of these habitat valuation metrics and scoring criteria in the remedial investigation for ETTP. r
Assessing Ecological Resources for Remediation and Future Land Uses on Contaminated Lands
Environmental Management, 2004
Increasingly, the public and governmental agencies are concerned about remediating and reclaiming contaminated sites. Understanding the ecological resources on-site and valuing those resources in terms of future uses is important for determining suitable future land uses. In this article, we suggest the major categories of natural resource information required by managers, policy makers, and the general public for making initial future land-use determinations. We then use a dataset of 25 Department of Energy (DOE) sites slated for remediation to explore whether such data are readily available and whether the data can be used to assess natural resource value. Although information is available for almost all sites on federally endangered and threatened species, this information is less available for state-listed species. Biodiversity information is available only for some sites for birds (N ϭ 17), mammals (N ϭ 15), reptiles (N ϭ 14), amphibians (N ϭ 13), and plants (N ϭ 11) and is almost nonexistent for invertebrates (N ϭ 2). Some information is available for invasive species (N ϭ 9). The number of available habitats is directly related to total acres and nonindustrial acres. Biodiversity of birds, mammals, and reptiles (but not amphibians) is directly related to both total acres and total nonindustrial acres of sites. These data suggest that even over a wide geographical area (from eastern to western United States), biodiversity relates to habitat size and number of habitats available. This information will be useful not only to DOE managers but also to natural resource trustees, ecologists, state and federal regulators, and the general public in the discourse over future uses of these lands.
Ecological Engineering, 2012
Habitat restoration is a low cost solution to water quality and runoff management issues. When planning a watershed scale restoration project, the choice of sites must be optimized to minimize financial and social cost whilst maximizing environmental benefits such as nutrient removal. This project has developed a land score system for prioritizing habitat restoration sites using the cost-benefit analysis framework. Benefits were assessed using a combination of two quantitative metrics: terrain-landuse analysis to identify areas of high areal pollutant flux and the Mauri Model decision-making framework to account for social, cultural, environmental and economic factors. The result is a simple, flexible restoration site prioritization tool that utilizes readily available data and can easily be implemented by land planners in a variety of watersheds. This decision making tool was applied as a case study to the Tarawera Watershed in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand with the objective of decreasing nutrient pollution in the watershed. The metrics used in this tool proved effective in anticipating hydrological, environmental and anthropologic constraints that were used to pick sites for restoration. The final result was an ordinally ranked map of potential restoration sites. It is anticipated that this technique will prove useful in a variety of watersheds despite variation in management goals and geographic location.
Long-Term Management of Contaminated Sites
________________________________________________________________ The desire to ensure both human and ecological health on contaminated lands is an important public policy issue. The task of remediation, restoration and long-term stewardship on these lands is particularly daunting for agencies that hold numerous, large tracts of land, such as the Department of Energy and Department of Defense. In this paper we discuss methods to integrate ecological resources, ecosystem services, risk, and the transition to long-term stewardship on Department of Energy lands as a case study. While determinations of future land use clearly lie with DOE, we suggest there are three types of information required about ecological resources before decisions can be made about remediation, transitions, and long-term stewardship: 1) what ecological resources and ecosystem functions (such as productivity) are present on site, and what is their spatial pattern, 2) what ecosystem services do these resources provide to people, and 3) what are the risks from the interactions between people and these ecosystems. With this information, managers can address how these ecological resources and services can be protected and monitored during and following remediation, and to provide early warning of potential degradation to the ecological resources themselves. This identification and assessment phase is critical to provide a baseline not only for decisions about remediation and future land use, but for adaptive management and long-term stewardship. It is also critical to evaluate the relative value of on-site ecosystems and to determine whether some lightly contaminated buffer lands should be relegated to federal ownership "in perpetuity" as environmental parks. While evaluating ecological resources and processes (for example, productivity, element cycling) can be very complex, we suggest that a few key measures can be useful, including species diversity of key groups (e.g. birds, mammals), number of invasive species, habitat diversity, and unique species 2 assemblages or habitats. Ecosystem services can be evaluated by a number of traditional measures (clean water, soil standards), as well as evaluating perceptions of suitable land uses and land use rates (number of days of exposure by engaging in recreational activities such as hunting, camping, etc). Once the ecological resources and ecosystem services are evaluated, then decisions about future land use, preservation or conservation, or protection of ecological resources within a designated land use can be implemented. Long-term stewardship requires both ecosystem protection in terms of the biological resources and their functioning, as well as biomonitoring to ensure that there is minimal radiological or chemical risk and to inform future management.
An ecologically oriented database to guide remediation and reuse of contaminated sites
Remediation Journal, 2003
This article presents a database developed to determine the potential reuse of contaminated sites for primarily ecologically and culturally based activities. The database consists of 172 quantitative and qualitative measures of on-site land suitability, ecological, cultural, and recreational value, and off-site suitability, economic, and demographic information. Using sites owned by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) as a case study, the article evaluates the quality of available data and suggests ways of using it for planning ecologically sensitive remediation activities and future land use. This type of database can be developed and used by anyone who needs to select, review, or evaluate site remediation and future land use options. Also discussed are the challenges associated with compiling and using data that has been generated by many sources over several years.
Evaluating habitat vulnerability to hazardous air pollutants in the southeastern United States
Integrated …, 2009
Long term protection and maintenance of ecological communities and populations must consider the effect of atmospheric pollutants in addition to stressors that occur on the ground. We describe a technique for identifying species ranges and ecosystems across the landscape where there could be potential effects from air toxics releases. We modified the ranking equations for hazardous air pollutants (HAPs) from the Chemical Scoring and Ranking Assessment Model (SCRAM) to come up with a weighted relative toxicity value. The model combines toxicity rankings from SCRAM, chemical ambient air concentration data from the Assessment System for Population Exposure Nationwide model, and species richness data from the Southeast Gap Analysis Project. The final output was a 30-m pixel grid of potential vulnerability to HAP exposures. We found that the model, in general, resulted in a circular pattern around major urban areas with vulnerability decreasing with distance from the urban center. Those areas having high acreage of federal, state, and locally protected lands were also highlighted by the models added weight for species richness. Since the final toxicity maps were in a raster format the data can be aggregated into any number of assessment units for use by multiple levels of decision makers including federal and state entities who want to compare relative toxicity exposures across a region and local groups who want to evaluate the vulnerability of lands under their management.
Journal of Great Lakes Research, 2016
Wetlands along the St. Lawrence River were severely impacted by habitat alteration and contamination as a consequence of construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Moses-Saunders power dam, and associated industrial development. Due to environmental degradation, the St. Lawrence River at Massena, New York has been designated as an Area of Concern (AOC) in the Laurentian Great Lakes. Within this AOC, there is an information gap on the current status of two Beneficial Use Impairments (BUIs): (1) loss of fish and wildlife habitat and (2) degradation of fish and wildlife populations. Both BUIs have the same evaluation endpoint: no difference between the AOC and comparable reference areas outside of the AOC. We evaluated coastal and palustrine wetlands by surveying biological, water quality, and landscape indicators within a sample of 17 wetlands in the AOC and 10 reference wetlands outside the AOC to establish georeferenced indices of biotic integrity and water quality. We did not detect a difference between the AOC and reference wetlands in any of the 14 biotic and 16 water quality metrics, but did find a difference in landscape setting. AOC wetlands were smaller and fewer, especially for woody wetlands. These results suggest that wildlife habitat quality and communities are not impaired in AOC wetlands yet it would be beneficial for additional key fish and wildlife assemblages and habitat types to be surveyed, multi-year monitoring of key biotic indicators implemented, and more specific redesignation criteria for wetland habitat and matrix landscape composition defined and met.