Decision Support for Regional Advance Mitigation Planning
Mitigating the impacts of transportation projects uses avoidance, minimization, and compensation or offsite mitigation actions. This project addressed offsite mitigation for the remaining impacts after avoidance and minimization have been applied. Offsite mitigation typically occurs during project execution, adjacent to the project, and in small, unsustainable, and ineffective actions. More recently, advance mitigation has been advocated to consider all projects in a long range transportation plan and identify the pool of mitigation sites that should be conserved for use and implemented in advance of projects. The expected benefits of this approach are streamlined transportation projects and more effective and efficient conservation through placement of mitigation projects in more desirable and sustainable locations. The Pikes Peak Area Council of Governments developed an initial Integrated Regional Mitigation Plan that quantified the expected impacts to a large number of species habitats and ecosystem types from the approximately 200 projects in the Long Range Transportation Plan. The authors then used a multi-factor process to select the pool of sites that could provide the necessary mitigation for a set of “mitigation targets” and weighted these with the presence of non-target but high priority biodiversity, other values (such as ecosystem services), and locational importance such as proximity to existing conservation lands. The resulting geospatial database will be used by project and mitigation partners to identify the mitigation needs of individual transportation projects, identify candidate locations for offsite mitigation, and prioritize a set of sites for field verification and other investigations into project suitability.
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Supplemental Notes:
- This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADC10 Standing Committee on Environmental Analysis in Transportation.
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Corporate Authors:
500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC United States 20001 -
Authors:
- Crist, Patrick
- Fink, Michelle
- Grunau, Lee
- Decker, Karin
- Casper, Craig
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Conference:
- Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting
- Location: Washington DC, United States
- Date: 2017-1-8 to 2017-1-12
- Date: 2017
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Digital/other
- Features: Figures; Maps; References; Tables;
- Pagination: 18p
- Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Decision support systems; Environmental protection; Habitat (Ecology); Long range planning
- Geographic Terms: Pikes Peak Region (Colorado)
- Subject Areas: Environment; Highways;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01623394
- Record Type: Publication
- Report/Paper Numbers: 17-00444
- Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
- Created Date: Jan 24 2017 3:32PM