Join us for lunch Dec 17 — Restoring California Habitats through Mitigation Banking and Turnkey Solutions: Process and Policy Basics
Conservation and Mitigation Banks can play a key role in restoring California’s degraded habitats and preserving the remaining vestiges of our natural resource heritage. Mitigation Banks and permittee-responsible mitigation (a.k.a. turnkey solutions) are a distinctive restoration process that enable large-scale restoration with a significant initial investment and long-term responsibility. This lunchtime talk will share an overview of mitigation banking including: the drivers, the process, the financial and time commitments, and how they can be an important solution to a client’s needs, as well as an important mechanism for restoration.
Over the course of just an hour, you will learn:
– What drives mitigation
– The difference between Banks and permitte responsible solutions
– The basics of creating a mitigation bank, the long term commitment, and why mitigation and bank credits can cost so much
Who will benefit from attending:
– Students wanting to learn about restoration and mitigation
– Consultants who have clients that need mitigation or who think they would like to help a client create a mitigation bank
– Agency staff who would like a better understanding of banking
– Anyone interested in learning how mitigation banking is an important driver of ecological restoration
Allegra Bukojemsky is a landscape architect with a focus and passion to strengthen and repair our connection to and stewardship of nature. She is part of a team of planners, ecologists, landscape architects, economists, and engineers at Westervelt Ecological Services (WES) that restore and manage over 30,000 acres of preserved wetland and endangered species habitat nationwide to provide mitigation and conservation solutions to meet state and federal permitting requirements. At WES she fills the roles of restoration designer, project manager, and construction manager for habitat restoration and mitigation. Passionate about restoration and design she is also involved with SERCAL and ASLA (national and local) helping promote better understanding and practice of the field.
Matt Gause is a botanist and restoration ecologist with over 29 years of experience with wetland and endangered species ecology, regulation, and mitigation throughout California and elsewhere in the United States. He has been involved in mitigation banking in California since 1999 and has worked almost exclusively on mitigation and conservation projects since 2004. Currently, he is the Ecological Resources and Land Stewardship Director at Westervelt Ecological Services and oversees the ecological and stewardship components of the company’s mitigation and conservation projects in California, the Rocky Mountain region and Southeastern United States. As part of this oversight, he is also responsible for the long-term durability of Westervelt’s conservation lands portfolio. Additionally, working with The Conservation Fund and Army Corps of Engineers IWR, Mr. Gause helps conduct national training courses on mitigation, including mitigation site selection, performance standard development, and long-term stewardship and stewardship funding. Passionate about coaxing ecological function out of degraded landscapes while ensuring the overall conservation outcome is durable into the future.
