wild files: partnering to protect biodiversity
situation
Environmental impact assessments help us identify ways to avoid, reduce or offset potentially significant impacts.
To establish a "baseline"—a good understanding of pre-project conditions—a standardized methodology is needed to:
- identify the biodiversity in a potential project location
- inform impact assessment and identification of mitigation measures
- monitor performance during project construction and operations
actions taken
We partnered with Conservation International (CI) to create a handbook for environmental field managers and professional biologists.
CI engaged multiple experts to develop a set of standardized methods for identifying and assessing a wide range of plants and animals.
These science-based methods can be conducted relatively rapidly and are adaptable to different environments.
results
These methods were published for public use in 2016. They focus on tropical terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems, including:
plants
large mammals
bats
small rodents
birds
reptiles
amphibians
freshwater fish
certain insects
benefits of the field guide:
- enables biodiversity data comparisons to other locations
- using same methodology enables interpretation of how many species occur at a site
- provides population-level abundance beyond presence-absence determination
- enables better understanding of how biodiversity changes over time
Since 1991, CI's Rapid Assessment Program teams have conducted a variety of biodiversity surveys:
in more than 123 terrestrial, freshwater and marine environments
leading to the discovery of more than 1,500 new species
and the protection of 20 million hectares of land, marine and coastal areas
our actions were consistent with our goal to conserve biodiversity: we strive to avoid or reduce the potential for significant impacts on sensitive species, habitats and ecosystems
Published: July 2018