Hello, I am an ecologist…

Hello,

I am an ecologist with a background in ecological restoration and I am opposed to the payment-in-lieu provision in the changes to the ESA. It simply is not rooted in sound science. It seems to be grounded in thinking that if we destroy a bit of habitat in one area, we'll just spend money and improve/build habitat somewhere. This is an extremely flawed concept which has been studied numerous times.

Habitat compensation projects rarely (if ever) come close to achieving the same sort of ecosystem productivity as what was there in the first place. The federal government has been trying this idea for decades with wetland compensation. A study of 16 habitat compensation projects found that AT LEAST twice the area that was destroyed needs to be created in order to achieve the same level of productivity; and that was only for the best projects. In order to ENSURE that productivity was compensated for, projects needed to create/improve 4.8x as much area as was destroyed. I will refer you to this paper for details: Quigley, J. T., & Harper, D. J. (2006). Effectiveness of fish habitat compensation in Canada in achieving no net loss. Environmental Management, 37(3), 351-366.

It's just foolish to think we can impact habitat in one location and reconstruct it elsewhere and everything will simply balance out. This policy needs to be avoided and no changes to the ESA should have anything to do with a payment in lieu policy.