Adapting Habitat Equivalency Analysis (HEA) to assess environmental loss and compensatory restoration following severe forest fires

Abstract

Over the past few decades, there has been a substantial increase in the number of large, high-severity forest fires in the western United States. The habitat loss caused by these fires can have broad ecological and economic consequences. Federal courts have acknowledged the legitimacy of damages claims based on state laws and regulations for habitat and ecological service losses resulting from high-severity fires, with some claims placing higher economic value on ecosystem services than traditional forest products (e.g., timber). This has created a need to adapt or develop new tools for quantifying the value of lost ecosystem services in the absence of well-defined regulatory or other generally accepted guidance.Habitat Equivalency Analysis (HEA), borrowed from a common Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) approach for quantifying environmental harm and restoration, is a tool that has been used to quantify forest fire habitat damages. HEA involves determining a baseline for habitat services that would have occurred in the absence of the fire, and determining the lost services from the time of the incident until ecosystem functions have been recovered to baseline conditions. Depending on the habitat being evaluated, recovery may take a century or more for old growth forests. This paper reviews and identifies critical issues that may affect the estimate of lost services following high- severity fires, including potential approaches for dealing with uncertainty. Some items discussed can be addressed in the short-term while others represent research and tool development opportunities.