Abstract
Natural resource trustee agencies must determine how much, and what type of environmental restoration will compensate for injuries to natural resources that result from releases of hazardous substances or oil spills. To fulfill this need, trustees, and other natural resource damage assessment (NRDA) practitioners have relied on a variety of approaches, including habitat equivalency analysis (HEA) and resource equivalency analysis (REA). The purpose of this paper is to introduce the Habitat-Based Resource Equivalency Method (HaBREM), which integrates REA’s reproducible injury metrics and population modeling with HEA’s comprehensive habitat approach to restoration. HaBREM is intended to evaluate injury and restoration using organisms that use the habitat to represent ecological habitat functions. This paper seeks to expand and refine the use of organism-based metrics (biomass-based REA), providing an opportunity to integrate sublethal injuries to multiple species, as well as the potential to include error rates for injury and restoration parameters. Applied by NRDA practitioners in the appropriate context, this methodology can establish the relationship between benefits of compensatory restoration projects and injuries to plant or animal species within an affected habitat. HaBREM may be most effective where there are appropriate data supporting the linkage between habitat and species gains (particularly regionally specific habitat information), as well as species-specific monitoring data and predictions on the growth, density, productivity (i.e., rate of generation of biomass or individuals), and age distributions of indicator species.
Highlights
Supplementary information The online version of this article contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.Boulder, CO, USA 5 US Department of the Interior, Washington, DC, USAThis paper addresses the scaling of compensatory restoration to address ecological injuries in the context of natural resource damage assessment (NRDA)1 under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980, 42 USC §9601, et seq. (CERCLA) and the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, 33 USC. §2701, et seq. (OPA)
Selection of more or fewer metrics could lead to different results in HabitatBased Resource Equivalency Method (HaBREM), but not because of any aggregation
The purpose of this paper is to introduce HaBREM as an NRDA method intended to evaluate metrics for organisms
Summary
This paper addresses the scaling of compensatory restoration to address ecological injuries in the context of natural resource damage assessment (NRDA) under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980, 42 USC §9601, et seq. Compensatory restoration is any action taken to compensate for interim losses of natural resources and services that occur from the date of the incident until recovery (15 CFR § 990.30). Under HaBREM, any decline in a single ecological metric results in a decline in the overall services of the habitat, regardless of the quantity of the other indicators available. Said another way, an increase in any one metric cannot compensate for a decline in another. Considerations for selecting appropriate indicator variables that relate to ecological services are reviewed in NOAA (2000); Peterson et al (2003); Strange et al (2002); Kandziora et al (2013)
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