Restoration Scaling Approaches to Addressing Ecological Injury: The Habitat-Based Resource Equivalency Method

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.

Meta‐analysis of salt marsh vegetation impacts and recovery: a synthesis following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

“…As a further argument for biomass‐based metrics (aboveground and belowground), direct biomass measures are often advantageous for injury quantification and restoration scaling under NRDA (Baker et al. 2020 ). Given that belowground biomass development and maturity in restored marshes is also a long‐term process (Ebbets et al.…”

“…Coupling belowground biomass with standardized soil shear strength measurements is also recommended for both vegetation and erosion studies (as in Lin et al 2016). As a further argument for biomass-based metrics (aboveground and belowground), direct biomass measures are often advantageous for injury quantification and restoration scaling under NRDA (Baker et al 2020). Given that belowground biomass development and maturity in restored marshes is also a long-term process (Ebbets et al 2019), more in-depth and comparable information on belowground biomass recovery in oiled marshes would be valuable for NRDA injury determinations and restoration planning.…”

“…Our resulting synthesis provides further understanding of impacts arising from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and informs environmental impact analysis, contingency planning, emergency response, damage assessment, and restoration efforts to curb negative impacts from future spills. Our synthesis on impact and recovery time frames should be particularly valuable for environmental analyses of oil exploration, production, and transportation activities, as well as for NRDA injury assessments and restoration planning, where impactrecovery trajectories are important inputs to Habitat Equivalency Analysis (HEA), Resource Equivalency Analysis (REA), and other similar approaches used for restoration scaling (i.e., determining the type and amount of restoration needed to offset resource impacts; Peterson et al 2008, Jones and DiPinto 2018, Baker et al 2020, Fricano et al 2020.…”

Compensation for Environmental Damage: Progressively Casting a Wider Net, But What’s the Catch?

“…298 Both CERCLA and OPA rely on federal agencies and state agencies to serve as Natural Resource "Trustees" 299 who are authorized to assess and recover damages, on behalf of the public, from potentially responsible parties as compensation for injuries to natural resources that result from releases of either hazardous substances (CERCLA) and oil spills (OPA). 300 In a first instance, the Trustees will try to adopt a 'scaling' approach to determine the optimal scale of restoration actions that can be determined by non-market valuation methods, service-to-service, or resource-to-resource approaches, such as habitat equivalency analysis (HEA), whereby the services lost from a natural resource injury will be calculated and restoration alternatives will be developed accordingly so that these will provide the same amount of services to the public. 301 HEA scales injured resources and lost services on a "one-to-one trade-off basis", and would typically entail improvements to replacement ecosystems or the creation of a new site to provide equivalent ecosystem services until restoration is complete.…”

Estimating the Benefits of Derelict Crab Trap Removal in the Gulf of Mexico

“…We utilize the concepts of resource equivalency analysis (REA), a scaling method often employed in natural resource damage assessment that uses biological metrics as the unit of measure (e.g., number of organisms or lost biomass). As Baker et al (2020) describe, through REA natural resource injuries and the estimated restoration benefits needed to replace what was lost are easily replicated through use of transparent parameters and a stepwise replacement model. Here, the model parameters estimate the restoration benefit of a derelict trap removal project.…”