There is growing recognition that climate change, habitat fragmentation, and other global stressors are altering ecosystem dynamics. This paper discusses the incorporation of dynamic environmental conditions (i.e., non-stationarity) into restoration planning. The context is natural resource damage assessments (NRDA) addressing environmental impacts and lost services, primarily by using habitat equivalency analysis (HEA). Restoration ecologists traditionally incorporate an implicit assumption of stationarity and species-community dynamic equilibrium in designing habitat restoration. HEA has also typically been applied as a deterministic model assuming stationarity of environmental conditions. Anticipated increases in the frequency and severity of environmental disruptions (e.g. high temperatures, drought, extreme precipitation and coastal storm events, changes in the hydrological cycle, increased wildfires, etc.) can alter recovery trajectories, and reset or completely change ecological baselines. Thus, it is beneficial to identify restoration and compensatory actions that explicitly incorporate these influences, provide ecosystem resilience, and thereby protect or enhance primary and compensatory restoration.
22In 2009, five unique methods were used to inspect vegetation-related conditions along Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) rights-of-way (ROW). Some methods were trials that BPA committed to execute as part of a settlement with its regional regulatory organization, the Western Electric Coordination Council (WECC), for violations of reliability standards from vegetation grow-in related outages. A combination of simple, stratified, and 100% sampling were used to compare and contrast each inspection technique. A cost-replacement comparison between all inspection techniques was performed, weighting efficacy of one technique to another in the form of replacement value. Cost-benefit and return-on-investment analyses were also computed. From these analyses, LiDAR proved most effective in identifying vegetation related clearance issues but proved most costly, at least for initial establishment. The average cost of LiDAR trended downward with subsequent flights. The most cost effective method was using helicopters with either Natural Resource Specialists (NRS) or Transmission Line Maintenance (TLM) personnel serving as aerial observers, but this methodology proved the most inaccurate. Furthermore, the ancillary utility of LiDAR for related asset assessments more than justify the initial expense, includes power line sag ratings, asset (structures, insulators, roads, etc.) health, and encroachment identification. It is hypothesized that incorporating LiDAR sampling from 20% of the whole system per year to 40+ % may actually represent a cost-savings when allocating available resources system-wide. This data can also be used for documenting compliance with all federal regulations and requirements, as well as substitute for manual on-the-ground inspections, whether by BPA staff or third-party contractors.
The dramatic loss of wildlife habitat and ecosystem functions has been well documented, and much of the remaining habitat and services are highly stressed and/or fragmented. Valued biological and natural systems are threatened by rapid, non-stationary changes in environmental conditions associated with climate change, high severity wildfires, and other major perturbations. In response to these threats, resource management plans and climate adaptation strategies commonly call for the need to restore landscape connectivity in order to increase the resistance and resilience of natural systems. Although preservation and restoration of connectivity is well accepted as a desired management objective, few of the existing resource management tools explicitly or effectively address this need, especially when determining mitigation and compensatory restoration requirements to offset loss of ecosystem services due to releases of hazardous substances, human-caused high severity wildfires, and infrastructure development projects. When resources are valued and managed by enhancing the total amount of a desirable habitat or ecosystem function without metrics available to determine the effects of landscape connectivity, the restoration benefits cannot be reliably and defensibly estimated. This presentation explores the importance of incorporating the geospatial and temporal dynamics associated with landscape connectivity and non-stationarity in establishing compensatory restoration requirements at complex environmental settings. Furthermore, we present the conceptual framework for integrating connectivity and uncertainty into restoration scaling of lost environmental services.
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