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1Environmental and transportation agencies are changing how they do business. Par- ticularly relevant to the integration of conservation and transportation planning and regula tory permitting and consultation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) are transitioning to integra- tion of a watershed approach to permitting under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act (CWA). Also, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) is integrating recovery plan- ning in Endangered Species Act (ESA) Section 7 consultations. Transportation agencies at all levels are committed to earlier consultation and planning-level environmental analysis, to better avoid and minimize impacts and to uncover conservation invest- ments that may be needed now, to help recover species and restore watersheds. For many years, the quality of analysis that could be conducted on the planning level prevented earlier decision making. Environmental needs and priorities were not always included in long-range (20-year) transportation plans (LRTPs) or shorter- range (4- to 6-year) cost-constrained programming and budgeting, often called the transportation improvement plan (TIP) or state transportation improvement program (STIP). Advances in computing capacity, data, and modeling have enabled better, more informed, and scientifi cally sound environmental planning. Longer-range environ- mental assessment and planning can now occur, through analyses using geographic information systems (GIS), which can be integrated with transportation planning. Research can take advantage of integrated electronic data collection, management, and GIS analysis methods to integrate transportation planning and conservation planning at multiple scales, to accelerate project delivery and improve environmental outcomes. Public expectations are changing, too. Environmental stewardship and infra- structure capacity development are no longer viewed as either/or but rather both/and. Much transportation capacity development can be expected to enhance the environ- ment, species viability, and watershed restoration. In 2006, Congress addressed this 1 INTRODUCTION
2PRACTITIONERâS GUIDE TO THE INTEGRATED ECOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK expectation in the Transportation Research Boardâs (TRBâs) second Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP 2) Capacity program and its charge to develop approaches and tools for systematically integrating environmental requirements into the analysis, planning, and design of new highway capacity. Practitioners sometimes struggle with how to comply with the CWA and ESA and put into practice planning-level environmental decision making and integrated conservation-transportation planning. This guide tries to show a way: the Integrated Ecological Framework (IEF) provides natural resource and transportation practi tioners with a step-by-step, peer-reviewed, and science-based process that guides development of conservation and restoration priorities and explains how to integrate those priorities in the transportation decision-making process. This guidance is also provided online as part of the PlanWorks (formerly known as Transportation for Communitiesâ Advancing Projects through Partnerships, or TCAPP) web tool (available here until the PlanWorks website is ready: http://www.transportationforcommunities.com) (1). The website includes documentation on commonly used methods, data, and tools and supporting case studies on their successful use in integrated planning. Practitioners are provided with (1) recommendations on the use of data, tools, and methods; (2) a corresponding road map for improving and streamlining decisions by introducing the appropriate environmental information earlier in the decision-making process; and (3) assistance for practitioners who want to adopt decision-making practices that inte- grate environmental considerations. The need for an integrated environmental framework that leverages resources across agencies and environmental program areas is clear. The Environmental Law Institute recently estimated that private and public expenditures for compensatory mitigation under Section 404 of the CWA come to about $2.9 billion annually (2). In addition to serving as the primary source of funds to restore wetlands and water- sheds across the nation, these funds represent more than three-quarters of all natural resources mitigation expenditures nationally. (The amount spent under the ESA or by transportation agencies in the Section 7 process is unknown.) The tight budgets faced by government at all levels underline the need to use tools like the IEF to steward both public tax dollars and natural resources. The IEF started with interviews and surveys of over 150 frontline practitioners at resource and transportation agencies in 2009, as the National Academiesâ SHRP 2 research project C06 identified three major obstacles to integrated transportation plan- ning. Participants agreed that the top barriers were (1) lack of data, information, and tools; (2) lack of resources, especially time and manpower; and (3) resistance to institutional/process change. Notably, previous research had also pointed to the lack of environmental data as a particular obstacle to achieving better environmental results from transportation decision making in transportation planning and project develop- ment (e.g., National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Projects 8-38 and 25-25/32). A complete overview of the barriers, by agency, is available in the SHRP 2 C06 final report, An Ecological Approach to Integrating Conservation and Highway Planning, as well as interests, solutions, and incentives.
3PRACTITIONERâS GUIDE TO THE INTEGRATED ECOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK Some progress has been made in restoring and compensating for the loss of aquatic functions. However, to date, practitioners on all sides have been pressed to achieve performance metrics on timeliness. Objectives that are more difficult to achieve have sufferedâfor example, identifying the highest conservation and restoration needs in a watershed or ecoregion and integrating that information with transportation plan- ning, to get a head start on CWA Section 404 and ESA Section 7 compliance. Satisfy- ing the operative regulations and internal agency processes is also a dominant goal of frontline staff; however, as Gardner noted in 2009, much of the mitigation has not led to the creation, restoration, or conservation of important wetland habitats (3). The current system works well at avoiding and minimizing losses at the design-level postplanning phaseâwhen engineering and survey data are available. But if agencies bypass analysis and decision making on avoidance and potential conservation invest- ments at the broader-scale planning level, then larger-scale opportunities to avoid and minimize impacts or to preserve important areas are lost. Historically, these inefficien- cies have stemmed from a lack of easily accessible data that regulators would consider sufficient for proactive analysis and early commitments. Both are needed to maximize department of transportation (DOT) investments in conservation or restoration of significant areas, to help achieve watershed goals. Decision making in project develop- ment and permitting (during or after preliminary engineering design) and suboptimal mitigation outcomes result because resource agencies often feel they cannot effectively consult earlier, without knowing more about the resources in question. However, as with all issues related to planning and information, the lack of perfect data should not interfere with environmental consultation and decision making, especially while other decision making proceeds. A clear obstacle to better transportation and conservation outcomes is the lack of a reasonable and comprehensive set of conservation and resto- ration priority areas that make up a preapproved set of mitigation sites. Two requirements are critical for improved outcomes. The first is to provide the tools planners can use to identify potential impacts to regulated resources early in the planning process, allowing them to avoid or minimize the impacts as much as possible. The second is to ensure that any mitigation which must occur (because of unavoidable impacts) will provide effective, measurable, and high-quality environmental outcomes for the affected resources. Problems under Section 7 of the ESA result from both the lack of certainty about the probability and degree that a project may affect a listed species and the lack of certainty about how to design meaningful mitigation measures. However, the development of digital maps showing the probable distribution of all listed species (and other species of concern) is economically feasible and can signifi- cantly improve conservation and project planning for regulators and transportation agencies. (For example, see box on page 4.)
4PRACTITIONERâS GUIDE TO THE INTEGRATED ECOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK Inductive Species Distribution Models Most information on listed species locations currently exists in the form of observations, instead of habitat and predicted distributions. The occurrence of species is highly sensitive and, as a result, is not readily shared with transportation agencies or the public. However, these highly sensitive maps showing precise known locations of federally listed species can be transformed into public domain maps showing where these species are most likely to occur or where their habitat needs to be protected, through inductive modeling methods that learn rules about where species are likely to occur. To date, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) Section 7 consultation process has mostly relied on maps, such as the one on the left, in the early stages of planning and project develop- ment. Agencies typically held off on decision making until surveys could occur, later in design and closer to construction. The map on the left shows possible species locations in the form of observation points, broadened out to counties or ecological subsections (rather than the habitat type and predicted distributions on the right, which are based on highly sophisticated inductive models). Making it even more difficult for state and local agencies to plan development, the red dot species occurrence information on the left was frequently not released for viewing by transportation agencies, local governments, or the public. Agencies were left with green areas covering large portions of the state, without knowing where conservation of habitat or investment in particular structures or manage- ment practices was most important to avoid impacts. A handful of states have now developed inductive models to more scientifically project spe- cies distributions and create high-resolution maps. For example, using data from the Natu- ral Heritage Networkâs Biotics species observations database and powerful new software for modeling species predictive distributions (e.g., DOMAIN, Random Forest, Maximum Entropy), predictive distribution maps of listed threatened and endangered species were developed which better represent where species might be. They also produced lists of the top factors associated with the location of species, which are useful in understanding and projecting the impact of climate change on species. Finally, these models can significantly reduce the size of areas requiring inventory for endangered species. The models can be used to define not only potentially occupied habitat but, most significantly, through prob- ability analyses, areas which are not potential habitat for any listed species. Figure 1.1 shows a detail of the bog turtle map, illustrating how the probability of presence can be identified and used to create maps for both Section 7 review and recovery planning. New York has completed such models for 250 species. (continued)
5PRACTITIONERâS GUIDE TO THE INTEGRATED ECOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has been using similar but simpler models to derive critical habitat for use in listing species under the ESA and developing recovery plans. As a result, regulators are familiar with the models and understand their potential utility. In addition, the USFWS is developing a Section 7 decision support tool that focuses on ana- lyzing impacts by spatially mapping threats identified in listing and recovery documents and integrating the actions. The current tool used by the USFWS requires distribution in- formation and would be significantly improved using inductive models. In proactive parts of the transportation planning framework, planners could use inductive models to locate and avoid probable distributions of endangered species. Areas where occupation was less likely could be preferred for transportation infrastructure development; important habitat areas could be avoided, from the earliest points, when planning is not far along and local governments are not yet counting on improvements in a location chosen without this sort of analysis. Only the USFWS can decide the likelihood of occurrence thresholds to be used for each species (e.g., 50% likelihood for investment in avoidance and minimization measures, or perhaps 85%+ likelihood for investment for enhancing or extending effective conserva- tion/protection of the best areas for species viability). But other agencies can participate in other steps in the integrated planning process, such as integrating available maps and including critical habitat and recovery goals digitally in planning criteria for regional eco- logical frameworks. Figure 1.1. Traditional (left) and new (right) maps showing distribution of the bog turtle in New York State. Red dots indicate occurrences, and the green on the left map indicates the ecological subsections in which the turtles occur. (Source: New York Natural Heritage Program.)
