12-19-2006, 08:10 PM
AUSTIN, Texas-Transportation and wildlife officials in April announced an agreement to increase large-scale wildlife habitat protection while also facilitating new highway projects.
The written agreement between the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) and the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) formalizes and expands the environmental strategy known as mitigation banking.
"Increasingly, wildlife biologists and other environmental scientists realize that to effectively conserve those woods and waters that are the key for wildlife survival and our human quality of life, you really have to work on a landscape scale," said Joseph B.C. Fitzsimons, TPW Commission chairman. "With a big mitigation bank, we're talking about the ability to protect major components of the ecosystem, such as river watersheds or coastal marshes."
Federal laws such as the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act allow compensation for losses of wetlands and endangered species' habitat that result from public works projects. This is known as mitigation, meaning natural resource restoration, creation, enhancement or preservation to compensate for unavoidable resource losses caused by development projects.
Historically, this could mean many small mitigation sites patch-worked along a new highway. The new interagency agreement focuses mitigation on large acreage sites picked in advance for their ecological value.
The written agreement between the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) and the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) formalizes and expands the environmental strategy known as mitigation banking.
"Increasingly, wildlife biologists and other environmental scientists realize that to effectively conserve those woods and waters that are the key for wildlife survival and our human quality of life, you really have to work on a landscape scale," said Joseph B.C. Fitzsimons, TPW Commission chairman. "With a big mitigation bank, we're talking about the ability to protect major components of the ecosystem, such as river watersheds or coastal marshes."
Federal laws such as the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act allow compensation for losses of wetlands and endangered species' habitat that result from public works projects. This is known as mitigation, meaning natural resource restoration, creation, enhancement or preservation to compensate for unavoidable resource losses caused by development projects.
Historically, this could mean many small mitigation sites patch-worked along a new highway. The new interagency agreement focuses mitigation on large acreage sites picked in advance for their ecological value.