Holly E. Copeland

Development by design: blending landscape‐level planning with the mitigation hierarchy

Compensatory mitigation, or biodiversity offsets, provide a mechanism for maintaining or enhancing environmental values in situations where development is being planned, despite detrimental environmental impacts. Offsets are generally intended as an option for addressing any remaining environmental impacts of a development plan, after efforts have been made to avoid, minimize, or restore on-site impacts. Although offset programs require that developers adhere to the mitigation hierarchy to avoid, minimize, and restore biodiversity on-site before considering an offset for residual impacts, no quantitative guidelines exist for this decision-making process. What criteria are needed to require that impacts be minimized or avoided altogether? Here, we examine how conservation planning can provide a way to address this issue. By blending landscape-level conservation planning with application of the mitigation hierarchy, we can ensure that the use of biodiversity offsets is consistent with sustainable developmen...

A Framework for Implementing Biodiversity Offsets: Selecting Sites and Determining Scale

Biodiversity offsets provide a mechanism for maintaining or enhancing environmental values in situations where development is sought despite detrimental environmental impacts. They seek to ensure that unavoidable negative environmental impacts of development are balanced by environmental gains, with the overall aim of achieving a net neutral or positive outcome. Once the decision has been made to offset, multiple issues arise regarding how to do so in practice. A key concern is site selection. In light of the general aim to locate offsets close to the affected sites to ensure that benefits accrue in the same area, what is the appropriate spatial scale for identifying potential offset sites (e.g., local, ecoregional)? We use the Marxan site-selection algorithm to address conceptual and methodological challenges associated with identifying a set of potential offset sites and determining an appropriate spatial scale for them. To demonstrate this process, we examined the design of offsets for impacts from development on the Jonah natural gas field in Wyoming.

Mapping Oil and Gas Development Potential in the US Intermountain West and Estimating Impacts to Species

Background Many studies have quantified the indirect effect of hydrocarbon-based economies on climate change and biodiversity, concluding that a significant proportion of species will be threatened with extinction. However, few studies have measured the direct effect of new energy production infrastructure on species persistence. Methodology/Principal Findings We propose a systematic way to forecast patterns of future energy development and calculate impacts to species using spatially-explicit predictive modeling techniques to estimate oil and gas potential and create development build-out scenarios by seeding the landscape with oil and gas wells based on underlying potential. We illustrate our approach for the greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) in the western US and translate the build-out scenarios into estimated impacts on sage-grouse. We project that future oil and gas development will cause a 7–19 percent decline from 2007 sage-grouse lek population counts and impact 3.7 million ha of sagebrush shrublands and 1.1 million ha of grasslands in the study area. Conclusions/Significance Maps of where oil and gas development is anticipated in the US Intermountain West can be used by decision-makers intent on minimizing impacts to sage-grouse. This analysis also provides a general framework for using predictive models and build-out scenarios to anticipate impacts to species. These predictive models and build-out scenarios allow tradeoffs to be considered between species conservation and energy development prior to implementation.

Measuring the effectiveness of conservation: a novel framework to quantify the benefits of sage-grouse conservation policy and easements in Wyoming.

Increasing energy and housing demands are impacting wildlife populations throughout western North America. Greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus), a species known for its sensitivity to landscape-scale disturbance, inhabits the same low elevation sage-steppe in which much of this development is occurring. Wyoming has committed to maintain sage-grouse populations through conservation easements and policy changes that conserves high bird abundance “core” habitat and encourages development in less sensitive landscapes. In this study, we built new predictive models of oil and gas, wind, and residential development and applied build-out scenarios to simulate future development and measure the efficacy of conservation actions for maintaining sage-grouse populations. Our approach predicts sage-grouse population losses averted through conservation action and quantifies return on investment for different conservation strategies. We estimate that without conservation, sage-grouse populations in Wyoming will decrease under our long-term scenario by 14–29% (95% CI: 4–46%). However, a conservation strategy that includes the “core area” policy and

Geography of Energy Development in Western North America: Potential Impacts on Terrestrial Ecosystems

250 million in targeted easements could reduce these losses to 9–15% (95% CI: 3–32%), cutting anticipated losses by roughly half statewide and nearly two-thirds within sage-grouse core breeding areas. Core area policy is the single most important component, and targeted easements are complementary to the overall strategy. There is considerable uncertainty around the magnitude of our estimates; however, the relative benefit of different conservation scenarios remains comparable because potential biases and assumptions are consistently applied regardless of the strategy. There is early evidence based on a 40% reduction in leased hectares inside core areas that Wyoming policy is reducing potential for future fragmentation inside core areas. Our framework using build-out scenarios to anticipate species declines provides estimates that could be used by decision makers to determine if expected population losses warrant ESA listing.

Sage-Grouse and Cumulative Impacts of Energy Development

Rapid development of the rich energy resources found in western North America may have dramatic consequences for its vast areas with low human population density and undeveloped wild lands. If development continues at its current pace, the outcome will probably be energy sprawl (McDonald et al.2009), resulting in a western landscape fragmented by energy infrastructure such as roads, well pads, wind towers, and transmission lines. Scientists increasingly warn of the threat posed by energy sprawl to iconic western species such as sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) and prong-horn (Antilocapra americana). Clearly, energy development is detrimental to many wildlife species, and the increasing demand for energy and the West’s abundant supply nearly ensure that these resources will be developed. Our aim here is to illustrate the scale of potential impacts, to draw comparisons between different energy sources, and to catalyze large-scale planning efforts designed to meet energy demands while reducing impacts on sensitive wildlife species and habitats.

Energy by Design: Making Mitigation Work for Conservation and Development

World demand for energy increased by more than 50 percent in the last half-century, and a similar increase is projected between now and 2030 (National Petroleum Council 2007). Fossil fuels will remain the largest source of energy worldwide, with oil, natural gas, and coal accounting for more than 80 percent of world demand ( chap. 1). Projected growth in U.S. energy demand is 0.5–1.3 percent annually (National Petroleum Council 2007), and development of domestic reserves will expand through the first half of the twenty-first century. Western states and provinces will continue to play a major role in providing additional domestic energy resources to the United States and Canada, which is expected to place unprecedented pressure on the conservation of wildlife populations throughout the West.

Conserving migratory mule deer through the umbrella of sage‐grouse

The world faces a mass extinction event that threatens 10–30 percent of all mammal, bird, and amphibian species (Wilson 1992 Novacek and Cleland 2001 Kiesecker et al. 2004 Levin and Levin 2004). Anthropogenic stres-sors, such as invasive species, overexploitation, pollution, and climate change, contribute to the crisis, but habitat destruction is by far the most influential factor in this unprecedented loss of biodiversity (Vitousek et al. 1997b Hardner and Rice 2002). Development pressures will increase dramatically if global economic growth doubles by 2030 as expected (World Bank 2007), and unprecedented investment in energy development—more than

Development by Design: Using a Revisionist History to Guide a Sustainable Future

20 trillion—will be needed to support this growth, especially in developing countries (International Energy Agency 2007). This surge in development will only accelerate habitat destruction. Thus, given the importance of economic development for improving human well-being, substantial improvement in our ability to balance development needs with environmental conservation is crucial.

Modeling the Distribution of Migratory Bird Stopovers to Inform Landscape-Scale Siting of Wind Development

Conserving migratory ungulates in increasingly human-dominated landscapes presents a difficult challenge to land managers and conservation practitioners. Nevertheless, ungulates may receive ancillary benefits from conservation actions designed to protect species of greater conservation priority where their ranges are sympatric. Greater Sage-Grouse (Centrocerus urophasianus), for example, have been proposed as an umbrella species for other sagebrush (Artemesia spp.)-dependent fauna. We examined a landscape where conservation efforts for sage-grouse overlap spatially with mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) to determine whether sage-grouse conservation measures also might protect important mule deer migration routes and seasonal ranges. We conducted a spatial analysis to determine what proportion of migration routes, stopover areas, and winter ranges used by mule deer were located in areas managed for sage-grouse conservation. Conservation measures overlapped with 66–70% of migration corridors, 74–75% of stopovers, and 52–91% of wintering areas for two mule deer populations in the upper Green River Basin of Wyoming. Of those proportions, conservation actions targeted towards sage-grouse accounted for approximately half of the overlap in corridors and stopover areas, and nearly all overlap on winter ranges, indicating that sage-grouse conservation efforts represent an important step in conserving migratory mule deer. Conservation of migratory species presents unique challenges because although overlap with conserved lands may be high, connectivity of the entire route must be maintained as barriers to movement anywhere within the migration corridor could render it unviable. Where mule deer habitats overlap with sage-grouse core areas, our results indicate that increased protection is afforded to winter ranges and migration routes within the umbrella of sage-grouse conservation, but this protection is contingent on concentrated developments within core areas not intersecting with high-priority stopovers or corridors, and that the policy in turn does not encourage development on deer ranges outside of core areas. With the goal of protecting entire migration routes, our analysis highlights areas of potential conservation focus for mule deer, which are characterized by high exposure to residential development and use by a large proportion of migrating deer.