Compensatory Mitigation Meets Managed Relocation: A Strategy to Benefit the Long-term Resiliency of Wetland and Stream Mitigation Projects

Successful re-establishment of native vegetation is critical to ensure that a wetland or stream mitigation project provides the full suite and magnitude of expected functions and values. Due to the important role played by a site's plant community, many state Interagency Review Team's have issued guidance documents that provide criteria for the selection of native tree, shrub, and herbaceous species to be included in a planting plan. These guidance documents often recommend that species selected for use at a mitigation site must be native to a county, ecoregion, state, or other geographic area. However, such revegetation requirements could negatively affect the long-term ecological sustainability of a mitigation project under a changing climate and globalized world as species' distributions shift to track preferred abiotic tolerances or as novel invasive species become introduced. This presentation will examine the concept of managed relocation (which was originally examined by ecologists relative to the conservation of rare or endangered species) and how it could be utilized by mitigation practitioners to improve long-term project resiliency.