Abstract Summary
When significant marine habitats such as coral reefs are damaged by vessels, a Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) is typically performed to enumerate the extent of the injury and determine the appropriate scale of primary and compensatory restoration. Resource Equivalency Analysis (REA) is one tool that may be used to scale a compensatory restoration or mitigation actions from injury events. REA utilizes service-to-service scaling to estimate lost ecological services. Scaling is especially important in complex habitats such as hardbottom, which are highly variable in structure, rugosity, core species, species assemblages, and species diversity. Recovery from injury can be equally variable, with some individual resources recovering relatively quickly (years) while others may have very long recovery horizons (decades to centuries) or may never recover at all. While the benefits of REA in the damage assessment domain is well known, REA can also be a useful instrument to address known, quantifiable impacts that are expected to occur from permitted or authorized coastal construction activities. FKNMS evaluated a large transportation infrastructure project in 2015 whose methods involved impacts to the seabed from equipment and vessels across a 16-acre work corridor. The potential injury to coral and hardbottom species was calculated from the estimated footprint of impacts and species density within the construction area. Using REA, FKNMS considered the extent of injuries to and recovery characteristics of each core hardbottom component to determine the restoration needed to provide comparable resources and services to compensate for the construction losses. The resulting compensatory restoration project featured restoration using a “high-value” coral species (Acropora cervicornis) in exchange for the loss of a wide variety of hardbottom coral species. In this manner, REA can be applied in non-traditional scenarios to compensate for unavoidable resource losses and promote habitat restoration when “species for species” restoration is not an option.
