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

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.

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:

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