# Presentation: 495383

## Integrating Green and Gray Infrastructures---Eco-Logical Approaches and the Passage of Wild Things

- Kevin Moody
- Resource Center (ENV TST)
- Federal Highway Administration

## Integrating Green and Gray Infrastructure: the Eco-Logical Approach and the Passage of Wild Things

- Outline:
- Design Themes and Context Sensitivity
- Analytic Framework – Show Your Work
- Rational Approaches to Problems and Opportunities

## Keep the Spaghetti off the Wall

- Workshop Foundations
- Institutionalizing Rational Approaches to Decision Making through Scientifically Sound Analyses is a Legitimate Pathway to “Leadership” and “Best” (vision and mission)
- Implicit association with reliability and safety
- Investments in Positive Passage should have Measurable Environmental Benefits

## Integrating Green and Gray Infrastructure: the Eco-Logical Approach and the Passage of Wild Things

- Integrate an Eco-Logical Approach and SAFETEA-LU section 6001 to add value to long range and other transportation planning efforts

## Integrating Green and Gray Infrastructure: the Eco-Logical Approach and the Passage of Wild Things

- Outline:
- Design Themes and Context Sensitivity
- Analytic Framework – Show Your Work
- Rational Approaches to Problems and Opportunities

## Decision Guide (NCHRP25-27)

## Non-Structural

- Road (network) that accommodates fire & smoke
- Landscape corridors and agricultural retirement
- Lighting
- Easements
- Access
- Development
- Land Use, Logging ...

## Minimalist & Non-Structural

- Noise
- Lighting
- Wind
- Using topography in design
- Buy-outs

## Structural

- Re-tool off-the-shelf stuff
- Extra arches at bridges
- Rock channels and gullies
- Overpasses

## Fences & Jump Gates

**Notes:**
Key here is that the feature is unidirectional --- passes animals in one direction, not both.

## Wall & Passage

**Notes:**
Note lips as barriers along roadway; glorified box culvert design

## Guides and Culverts

**Notes:**
Note fencing and use of existing culvert.

## Integrating Green and Gray Infrastructure: the Eco-Logical Approach and the Passage of Wild Things

- Outline:
- Design Themes and Context Sensitivity
- Analytic Framework – Show Your Work
- Rational Approaches to Problems and Opportunities

## Values and Objectives

- Identify and Structure Values and Objectives
- Fundamental
- Means (quantifiable ways to achieve Fundamental Objectives)
- Resource Attributes
- Forcing Agents

- Why Important?

- Fundamentals

- How to Achieve?

- Means

## Ecological Principals

- Longevity and Recruitment Events
- Demographics and Age Structure
- Genetic Diversity
- Variable environment
- Ecosystem Forcing Agents
- Stabilizing influence
- One or More Habitats and Ecosystems

## Extinctions are Rarely Random

**Traits that Increase **
**Down the Food Web:**
**Vulnerability to stress**
**Adaptability**
**Spp. richness (insurance)**

**Traits that Increase **
**Up the Food Web:**
**Body size**
**Longevity**
**Home Range area**
**Vulnerability to **
**fragmentation**

**Notes:**
From Raffaelli, David (2004) Science v306 p. 1141 

## Range and Forcing Agents

**Leading Edge**

**Tail Edge**

_**Dominant Processes**_
- Long distance dispersal
- Founder events
- Populations events
- Lineage mixing
- Refugial isolation
- Genetic drift
- Local adaptation

## Sustainability

- Power Law Function?
- Deviations?
- Shifts continuous or discontinuous
- Biotic or Abiotic Forcing Agents
- Exposure-Response Profiles
- Feedbacks and Adjustments

## Sustainability

- Thresholds
- Resilience
- Alternate States
- Dynamic Equilibrium
- Complex Systems Behavior
- Feedbacks and Adjustments

**Notes:**
Scheffer figure 7

## Sustainability

## Complex System Behavior

## Stationarity is Dead

- Physical patterns and processes
- Flood frequency
- Wildlife magnitude
- Ecological patterns and processes
- Species Distribution and Abundance
- Community Assemblages and Niches
- Individual Responses
- Built Environment patterns and processes
- Behaviors

## The Basics

- Environmental Impacts Analysis
- Two-part analysis
- Categories of Impacts
- Uncertainty
- Sound Science and Administrative recordkeeping

- Congestion on I-95 in Northern Virginia

**Notes:**
Total cost of $63 billion/ year
In the 10 most congested cities each rush hour traveler congestion expense is between $800 and 1,600/year.

## Analyses ForRational Mitigation

**Notes:**
Narrative:
Now look at the curves.  If we add a hypothetical discount rate to the graph, we get a much more accurate and precise picture of the Total effects of the Project.  The area shaded in green represents the Total Effects of the project on the subject resource.  

Understanding that the total effects of a project on a resource includes time and discount rates for lost services or productivity should provide a reliable framework for thinking about mitigation.

Although many FHWA Division offices, and many states, have rules of thumb or guidance about mitigation, there are two core concepts that always apply:  One, mitigation is any action or change that reduces the Total Effect, and two, there must be a plausible link between what you are calling mitigation and the resources affected by the project.  

Buying a new fleet of pickup trucks for your fish and game agency would not generally be considered mitigation for blocking a fish spawning run for a season or two.

Total Effects reflect the change in anticipated trends and conditions any resource affected by the project, and incorporate the lost productivity, or discount rate, associated with time.  Some of those changes are caused by the project, or action-focused.  Other changes are perturbations or events that would occur regardless of our proposed project.  However, the implications of those events on the resource may be different under the with and without project scenarios if the action-focused effects altered the resilience, trajectory or other parameters.  These latter effects are the resource-focused effects.

In other words, the two-part analysis gives us information about the resources’ sustainability, and about the long term difference in resource trends and conditions under the with and without project futures.

The notion of Total Effects gets very complicated very quickly, just like going from the reductionist to the complex system perspectives, so the FHWA does not generally address Total Effects.  We present it here mostly as a mental tool that has value when considering mitigation.   

Mitigation generally seeks to reduce the total effect.   Mitigation, or the reduction of total effects, can be implemented in a number of ways.  When a mitigation option alters the exposure-response profile, or changes the outcome of action-focused, direct or indirect effects, it presumably dampens the intensity, or otherwise alters the with project trajectory and reduces the area of Total Effects.  

Sometimes, the most efficient mitigation strategy targets things like resilience.  Recall from the major purchase example in the beginning of this session that, for things like your credit worthiness or checking account balance, certain activities can change the threshold.  So it is in natural and social systems.  We can buffer the resource’s resilience or responses to perturbations.  This not only reduces the likelihood of having an unsustainable impact, but it can alter the with and without project trajectories.  Again, the Total Effect is reduced.  

In a spin off from the change threshold approach is to design a mitigation scheme that changes the perturbations and responses of the otherwise unrelated effects.  For example, the Net Benefits Programmatic for Section 4(f) is based on mitigation of someone else’s impacts to a target resource.  Again, by altering the conditions and trends, with no regard to the action-focused effects associated with our proposed project, we reduce the Total Effects of our project on the resource.   

Some Federal agencies and Federal programs have processes that allow them to consider Total Effects, and some courts are using the concept, too.  Those practitioners have mitigation options that are designed to reduce the discount rate, which, again, reduces Total Effect.  The FHWA and state partners routinely use some of these approaches, but we call them “front-loading” or “advanced mitigation,” or even “credits” as in carbon credits.   

## Environmental Impacts

- Categories of Effects
- Encroachment – Alteration
- Induced Growth and Related
- Two Parts to Analysis
- Interaction of Project and Resource Attribute (REC)
- Risk to REC Sustainability
- Analysis is part of Assessment
- Mitigation and Addressing Uncertainty

**Notes:**
Narrative:
It improves the consistency of action-focused effects evaluations if you have a standard way of thinking about transportation projects.  A suggested starting point is to break the project into major components.  This slide suggests five broad areas where any given transportation project could have a series of step-down actions, sometimes hundreds of step-down actions, that would trigger an exposure-response profile in the resources of concern. 

Think about it.  Can you think of any reasons that property owners may alter their behavior during the planning phase?  Might people with property in the right-of-way defer maintenance, especially if they are not sure whether or not the DOT will move their structure?  What does that mean if the deferred maintenance adversely affects the integrity of a historic building? This is a particularly interesting question since planning stage impacts may not be part of the analysis under the NHPA, but would be under NEPA. As a matter of ethics, think about what you would do if you knew that you would get two different answers depending on which law you did the analysis under.  Would doing the analysis under both laws improve the quality of information available to decision-makers and reviewers?

Likewise, it is not unknown for landowners with property near planned interchanges to change their management of the property, either.  

Construction often has multiple phases, and a whole set of action-focused effects unique to those phases.  Where and what happens in equipment and material staging areas, borrow sites, and disposal or fill sites may be as important to the decision-maker as what happens in the right-of-way.

Operations can be, depending on the project, a major source of analytic headaches.  This refers not just to traffic, but the way the traffic influences everything else.  Over the life of the project.  On the other hand, you are hopefully drawn to analytic nightmares and complex puzzles like a moth to light.  This can be the bread and butter of environmental impact analysts.   This is frequently the most challenging part of the project that practitioners have to deal with.  It is definitely the part of the project that drives concerns with land use changes, exurban growth, and landscape and community impact issues.

Maintenance has been a dark horse over the years, and sound analysts now make every effort to ensure that maintenance practices are fully incorporated into the analysis, and that any relevant environmental commitments are transmitted to the maintenance organization in a manner that ideally leads to perpetual implementation. 

The need to consider decommissioning during pre-project implementation analysis is rare.  Typically, it would only be evaluated if it is built into the design, in extremely sensitive situations.  For example, some road projects in national parks transect such nationally significant resources that the design dictates construction and decommissioning processes.

## EIA Basics

- Environmental Impact Analysis
- Identify, predict, evaluate [and mitigate] _relevant and potential effects caused by the project_ on affected resources
- Has two parts (Action and Resource Focused):
- Cause-and-effect (project’s interaction with resource attribute)
- Risk effect poses to resource’s sustainability

**Notes:**
Tab A Useful Information 

Tab B Interacts of Action with Each Resource
Narrative:
We have seen that our ability to predict and communicate models of the resource of concern and the action are the building blocks to any analysis.  This means that, when conducting Environmental Impact Analyses for the Federal Highway Administration under any of the environmental laws, you should be describing how the resource works.  You should be leaving a written record of the model you are using to conduct your analysis.  It could be conceptual, pictorial, a box and arrow diagram, a mathematical model, or just about anything.  The key is to identify the dependent and most important independent variables.  Likewise, you must clearly articulate what actions, in what sequence and in which space, are expected to interact with the resource.   A sound analysis depends on your ability to describe the relevant independent variables and how the project intersects with their functions or forms. 
We will not spend much time talking about models and building exposure-response, or cause-and-effect profiles in this session.  What we want you to take away from this session is the unequivocal understanding that just guessing, or making unsubstantiated statements of expected impacts, is poor science and poor public service.  The record should clearly identify your understanding of what makes the resource work, of how and why the project is going to interfere with those patterns and processes, and only then should you be saying what that means.
How the Resource of Concern Works in Space and Time
	Patterns, Processes
	Life History Requirements

What Actions Will Result from the Decision in Space and Time
 Planning (in special cases), Construction, Operations, Maintenance, Decommissioning (rare)
Sources of Uncertainty

Tab C Describe Trends and Conditions 
Trends and Conditions
Adjustments, Feedbacks, Discount Rates
Sustainability
Resilience and Thresholds
Response to Known Perturbations
Stressors and Drivers

Tab D Two-Part Analysis
Action-Focused
Resource-Focused
Total Effects
Mitigation
Uncertainty

Tab E Presentation of Results
What Do We Know
What Don’t We Know
How Important is What We Don’t Know
Monitoring – Adaptive Management

## EIA Basics

- Resources: Which Attributes or Elements?
- Resource Trends and Condition (Resilience)
- Action x Resource Interactions
- Feedbacks, Adjustments, and Risks to Sustainability (So What?)
- Mitigating Total Effects and Managing Uncertainty

**Notes:**
Tab A Useful Information 

Tab B Interacts of Action with Each Resource
Narrative:
We have seen that our ability to predict and communicate models of the resource of concern and the action are the building blocks to any analysis.  This means that, when conducting Environmental Impact Analyses for the Federal Highway Administration under any of the environmental laws, you should be describing how the resource works.  You should be leaving a written record of the model you are using to conduct your analysis.  It could be conceptual, pictorial, a box and arrow diagram, a mathematical model, or just about anything.  The key is to identify the dependent and most important independent variables.  Likewise, you must clearly articulate what actions, in what sequence and in which space, are expected to interact with the resource.   A sound analysis depends on your ability to describe the relevant independent variables and how the project intersects with their functions or forms. 
We will not spend much time talking about models and building exposure-response, or cause-and-effect profiles in this session.  What we want you to take away from this session is the unequivocal understanding that just guessing, or making unsubstantiated statements of expected impacts, is poor science and poor public service.  The record should clearly identify your understanding of what makes the resource work, of how and why the project is going to interfere with those patterns and processes, and only then should you be saying what that means.
How the Resource of Concern Works in Space and Time
	Patterns, Processes
	Life History Requirements

What Actions Will Result from the Decision in Space and Time
 Planning (in special cases), Construction, Operations, Maintenance, Decommissioning (rare)
Sources of Uncertainty

Tab C Describe Trends and Conditions 
Trends and Conditions
Adjustments, Feedbacks, Discount Rates
Sustainability
Resilience and Thresholds
Response to Known Perturbations
Stressors and Drivers

Tab D Two-Part Analysis
Action-Focused
Resource-Focused
Total Effects
Mitigation
Uncertainty

Tab E Presentation of Results
What Do We Know
What Don’t We Know
How Important is What We Don’t Know
Monitoring – Adaptive Management

## Sustainability

- _Not Defined_
- _Law or Regulation Specific_
- 	set by administrative process
- _Resource or Project Specific_
- 	based on natural phenomena, community standards, perceptions

**Notes:**
Narrative: 
Environmental Impact Analyses, regardless of statute, focus on “sustainability.”  As practitioners, we need to be cognizant of the dangers of using a word that is so common that it has no single, normative definition.  

Natural scientists and some social scientists define “sustainability” based on the resilience left to the resources’ dynamic equilibrium or most probable state.  

For our purposes, however, it is clear that “sustainability” is most often defined in other ways, including the specific implementing regulations we are working under, and the resource we are evaluating.  For example, under section 7 of the Endangered Species Act, “sustainability” is linked to appreciable reductions in the probability of survival of a listed species.  Several President’s have maintained that our projects should not lead to a net loss of jurisdictional wetlands.

And, in cases like community cohesion or aesthetics, we are dealing with perceptions that may or may not be characterized in a replicable, consistent way.

So, we say that Environmental Impact Analyses should inform us about “sustainability,” but we use that word as short hand.  It is up to each of us as practitioners to ensure that the subject matter experts doing the analysis, the publics and stakeholders, and the decision-makers are clearly informed about how “sustainability” is defined for each resource covered in our analyses.

Sustainability is also called stability (TXDOT guidance) or resilience (CEQ handbook); it can be a natural phenomena, a perception, or established by administrative process. 

Regardless of whether sustainability is defined administratively, by observations of natural processes and boundaries, or by community standards and perceptions, environmental impact analyses are intended to inform decision makers and publics about the ability of the resource to withstand the stress of the proposed action. 

The information we collect and analyze in Resource-focused analyses are related to the behavior of the resource itself.  The relevant information is that information which enhances our ability to predict outcomes.

## Thresholds and Sustainability

**Notes:**
Narrative:

The Level of Service example highlights more than just the need for two parts in any analysis.  It also points out that there are thresholds between most probable states, dynamic equilibria, or ranges.  And, this is a really important point.  

The two-part Environmental Impact Analyses should generate information about the sustainability of the resource in its’ current condition or state given everything else that is affecting it over space and time, as well as our potential action.

## Risk to Sustainability

**Notes:**
Narrative
This is a hypothetical resource response curve.  Each point along the curve represents a possible trend and condition of the resource over time and space.

If we imagine a highway action with a single set of interactions with the resource, the curve illustrates that we expect the risk to resource sustainability might be very different, depending on which point along the curve the resource is at.

So, Environmental Impacts Analyses must have two parts, and must describe the conditions and trends of the resource.

This is simply one hypothetical function of the many possible degradation functions that could have been used for illustrative purposes.

[Slide courtesy of Patrick E. O’Neil, Geological Survey of Alabama Water Investigations Program, and Chris Johnson, Alabama Department of Environmental Management Water Quality Branch.  Presented at the Alabama Water Resources Association meeting, September 2005, in Orange Beach, Ala. (talk titled: Hatchett Creek Regional Reference Watershed Study).]

## Resource Attribute

- REC
- Acronym for: Resources, Ecosystems, and Human Communities;
- Some practitioners use: Valued Ecosystem Component, or VEC (see Larry Cantor)
- REC’s are _***tractable attributes***_ of Environmental Quality

**Notes:**
Key Message:  The REC is the specific measurable resource, attribute, variable or stressor, function, value, etc. that can be modeled in exposure-response profiles, then fit back in to a system of interest (the resource) for a complete EIA.

Background:  Refer participants to workbook Glossary if warranted.

Interactivity: 

## Slide 32

**Notes:**
Key Message:  This conceptual model allows us to identify which variables are dependent, and which are independent, in any given interaction.  This facilitates understanding first order, second order, and higher level effects, so we can visualize how our proposal might interact with a resource, start to tease out limiting factors, mitigation options, and the condition of the resource.

Background:  Slide courtesy of Patrick E. O’Neil, Geological Survey of Alabama Water Investigations Program, and Chris Johnson, Alabama Department of Environmental Management Water Quality Branch.  Presented at the Alabama Water Resources Association meeting, September 2005, in Orange Beach, Ala. (talk titled: Hatchett Creek Regional Reference Watershed Study).

Interactivity: Explain - this chart is the workshop in a nutshell.  We have a REC (water resource), and a set of independent variables that influence the REC.  These independent variables are, in turn, dependent on second order independent variables.  And so on.  

Ask – use this chart to explain how a shoulder improvement might affect the REC.

Ask – okay, let’s for a minute go back to the direct, indirect, and cumulative terminology.  Where would a direct effect on the REC fall using this chart?  An indirect effect?  And, how could we use this to conceptualize cumulative effects?  

Independent and dependent variables.

Limiting factors.

Cause and effect.  Direct, indirect, and cumulative effects.

Reductionist and systems orientations.

## Influence Diagram

**Notes:**
Another example of independent and dependent variables, first and more orders.

Courtesy Brian Yanchik, FHWA

## REC is Dependent VariableStressor is Independent

**Notes:**
Narrative:  The R.E.C. is the attribute of a resource that will be the core focus of your analysis.  Conducting an environmental impact analysis requires us to be able to isolate the REC and the most influential stressors, drivers, or limiting factors that determine the REC’s trends and conditions.  This basic model framework allows us to tentatively identify thresholds to sustainability, the specific functions of the resource that will interact with our project, and the response of the REC to those interactions or exposures. 

This is no more and no less than f(x) = y, which you learned over and over starting in about the 7th grade.  In this case, we can say that f(x1) + f(x2) + f(x3) = y.  

As we’ve said from the very beginning, this concepts underlying the two part analysis, of direct, indirect, and cumulative impacts analysis, is not new to you.  

## Analysis and Assessment

- Predicting
- Effects

- Scoping

- Disclosing
- the
- Implications

- Identify
- useful
- information

- 	2. Resource-Focused
- Analysis

- Conduct:
- 1. Action-Focused Analysis

- Discuss uses and limits of the information

**Notes:**
Narrative:  
To be useful, information must be understood.  Communicating, or telling the analytic story effectively, requires us to put the aspects of our evaluation into a logical sequence.

This slide shows one approach.  We use the scoping process to decide which resources we want to evaluate, select “R-E’C’s, methodologies, and how we want the results presented.  Then, we conduct the two-part environmental Impacts Analysis by generating an action-focused effects analysis, which is input for the resource-focused analysis.  We consider mitigation, or ways to reduce the Total Effect, through out the analysis.   Finally, we discuss the results, with an emphasis on what we know, what we don’t know, and the relative importance of what we don’t know.