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Executive Summary The overall purpose of this project was twofold: to demonstrate the transferability of impact assessment methods from programmed transportation projects developed in California under a regional advance mitigation planning (RAMP) framework and to evaluate and help in the development of a national impact scoping tool being developed under SHRP 2 C40A called Eco-Plan. In California a consortium of government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and the University of California have been working on the development of a RAMP framework for the last several years. The University of California, Davis team for this SHRP 2 C40B1 project has served as the primary developer of the geospatial methods, beginning in 2005, and has collaborated with the California Transportation Agency (Caltrans) and the California Department of Water Resources. The UC Davis team has participated in a roundtable framework development group that has had active participation from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Caltrans, California Department of Fish and Wildlife (formerly California Department of Fish and Game), California State Parks, and California Department of Water Resources. The general approach in California offers several benefits over conventional project-by-project mitigation that are similar to benefits from the federal Eco-Logical program: (1) projected impacts from multiple projects could permit acquisition of larger areas, which generally is biologically more effective than acquisition of âpostage stampsâ and has lower subsequent management costs; (2) environmental review is potentially faster because explicit geographical information system analyses permit easy assessment of the impact projections; (3) advanced acquisition of lands to satisfy mitigation demand is typically cheaper than acquisition at later dates and ensures that resources are available to meet the mitigation requirements; (4) reduction of the number of parcels needed through bundling of mitigation needs for multiple projects potentially produces savings in terms of transaction costs for infrastructure agencies; (5) regulatory agencies can have the required service areas for any given impact (e.g., within the watershed a project is conducted in) incorporated into the portfolio of potential suitable mitigation sites; (6) the identification of regions that are highly suitable for mitigation of programmed projects provides an incentive for private mitigation banks to develop assets in those regions, permitting stabilization of markets for mitigation banking; and (7) the extended planning horizon for mitigation actions permits systematic conservation planning techniques that can lead to multiple regional conservation priorities being addressed by the mitigation. This SHRP 2 C40B project leveraged previous work, geospatial techniques, and ongoing collaborations in different parts of California. The transferability of the RAMP impact assessment methods was tested by analyzing a previously unassessed long transportation corridor: U.S. Highway 101 from Santa Barbara County north through Mendocino County, a distance of over 450 miles. 1
This project permitted several areas of the RAMP approach to be addressed that have not yet been satisfactorily developed. These areas included (1) approaches for transferring RAMP methods from one region to another; (2) methods for assessing and projecting the aquatic impacts and mitigation needs from many bridge retrofits programmed for California; and (3) approaches for assessing impacts across a variety of landscapes, from rural natural landscapes to intensive agriculture to urban settings. The impact assessments for U.S. Highway 101âs programmed projects, as coordinated with Caltrans, comprised an inventory of currently funded and unmitigated projects and assessment of the projected impacts. Within the three Caltransâs districts, 68 transportation projects were analyzed for the likely occurrence of listed species. Transportation projects in District 4, representing the San Francisco Bay Area, were analyzed for urban impacts, including farmland. A number of other national-level, web-based tools were reviewed, and their applicability for mitigation assessment was tested in the coastal region of California. These tools are the ESA WebTool, NEPAssist, and the Information Planning and Conservation System. In addition, the Eco-Plan tool developed by the C40A team was tested using the data compiled for the region. The salient features of each of these national tools were brought to bear on the proposed study area, as well as within the timeline of environmental review and assessment in California. 2
