environment + Sustainability
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Atkins provided program management support to the U.S. Congress-approved Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, designed to improve 2.4 million acres of South Florida’s ecosystem. Photo: Atkins
Environmental restoration projects are a complex undertaking — for good reason. Whether restoring natural water flows, reducing negative impacts on local businesses, or ensuring compliance with federal regu- lations, any successful restoration effort must balance a wide variety of environmental, political, and community interests. In addition, each restoration project has its own uncertainties, requiring a flexible, ro- bust project design. Poorly implemented, a well-intentioned restoration project may take an unintended direction. Project approach When working on environmental restoration, whether it’s the Florida Everglades, the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, or Caño Martín Peña in Puerto Rico, it is important to study a project’s approach to restoration. Programs like these — as well as California Bay-Delta, Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, and Puget Sound in Washington State — are notable because they are a continuum in the alteration of already managed systems. The prospect for adaptive management should be included in project planning and implementation. Adaptive management begins at the programmatic level by employ- ing a science-based management approach to address scientific and technical uncertainties that may affect program and project goals and Using adaptive management to restore damaged ecosystems. By Don Deis, CEP Flexibility factor
objectives. There can be many uncertainties associated with ecosystem function and how the ecosystem components of interest will respond to a restoration project. In addition, there are uncertainties about the best design and operation for the project as the current managed system is altered for “better” ecological function. Using an adaptive management and monitoring approach during proj- ect planning provides a mechanism for building flexibility into proj- ect design and providing new knowledge to better define anticipated ecological responses. Using this approach also enables better selection of appropriate design and operating scenarios to meet project objec- tives. Additionally, an adaptive management approach will help define project success by developing performance measures and identify outcomes that should realistically be expected for the project. Modeling and monitoring The adaptive management process requires the combination of model- ing and monitoring. Most of the time with managed water-related sys- tems, a hydrologic model and a monitoring program may be already in place that may have been designed to manage the existing system. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which Atkins recently partnered with to restore significant portions of the Florida Everglades (www.atkin- sglobal.com/en-GB/projects/comprehensive-everglades-restoration- plan), has embraced conceptual ecological modeling, which defines the drivers, stressors, processes, attributes, and potential performance measures for all or parts of the restoration program. This step can lead to selecting project alternatives and performance measures that may be of significant use in the adaptive management process by providing a tool to enable quantitative prediction of ecosystem response.
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csengineermag.com
february 2018
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