Abstract
Biodiversity offsetting, or compensatory mitigation, is increasingly being used in temperate grassland ecosystems to compensate for unavoidable environmental damage from anthropogenic developments such as transportation infrastructure, urbanization, and energy development. Pursuit of energy independence in the United States will expand domestic energy production. Concurrent with this increased growth is increased disruption to wildlife habitats, including avian displacement from suitable breeding habitat. Recent studies at energy‐extraction and energy‐generation facilities have provided evidence for behavioral avoidance and thus reduced use of habitat by breeding waterfowl and grassland birds in the vicinity of energy infrastructure. To quantify and compensate for this loss in value of avian breeding habitat, it is necessary to determine a biologically based currency so that the sufficiency of offsets in terms of biological equivalent value can be obtained. We describe a method for quantifying the amount of habitat needed to provide equivalent biological value for avifauna displaced by energy and transportation infrastructure, based on the ability to define five metrics: impact distance, impact area, pre‐impact density, percent displacement, and offset density. We calculate percent displacement values for breeding waterfowl and grassland birds and demonstrate the applicability of our avian‐impact offset method using examples for wind and oil infrastructure. We also apply our method to an example in which the biological value of the offset habitat is similar to the impacted habitat, based on similarity in habitat type (e.g., native prairie), geographical location, land use, and landscape composition, as well as to an example in which the biological value of the offset habitat is dissimilar to the impacted habitat. We provide a worksheet that informs potential users how to apply our method to their specific developments and a framework for developing decision‐support tools aimed at achieving landscape‐level conservation goals.
Highlights
Biodiversity offsetting is the term applied to compensation for unavoidable environmental damage from anthropogenic development, in which the goal is to achieve a net neutral or positive outcome through the restoration of degraded habitat or the reconstruction of new habitat, generating ecologically equivalent gains elsewhere (Gibbons and Lindenmayer 2007, Kiesecker et al 2009, Doherty et al 2010, Maron et al 2012)
This distance can be estimated from scientific knowledge of bird behavior, as in our example for waterfowl based on Loesch et al (2013) and our example for grassland birds based on Shaffer and Buhl (2016), or from conducting field-based research aimed at obtaining this knowledge
In the geography in which our example occurs, the Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) of the United States, 86% of the 3.4 million wetland basins mapped by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) National Wetlands Inventory (NWI) program are ≤0.80 ha, and NWI provides a measurable unit of number or area of wetlands
Summary
Biodiversity offsetting is the term applied to compensation for unavoidable environmental damage from anthropogenic development, in which the goal is to achieve a net neutral or positive outcome through the restoration of degraded habitat or the reconstruction of new habitat, generating ecologically equivalent gains elsewhere (Gibbons and Lindenmayer 2007, Kiesecker et al 2009, Doherty et al 2010, Maron et al 2012). Biodiversity offsetting historically has been applied to wetland habitats (McKenney and Kiesecker 2010) and, more recently, to terrestrial habitats impacted by energy development (Doherty et al 2010, Kiesecker et al 2010). The impediments to implementation in the energy sphere, such as the development of reliable and biologically based currencies for estimating the sufficiency of Article e01983; page 2
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