Abstract
Starting in January 2000, FHWA, the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and partners at public and private resource organizations came together to design an impact assessment and advance a mitigation and conservation banking process to aid in the recovery of declining species on Colorado’s Eastern Plains. The Shortgrass Prairie Initiative provides programmatic clearance for CDOT activities on the existing road network in the eastern third of Colorado for the next 20 years—through 2022; addresses 3 listed and more than 20 declining species with the greatest likelihood of being listed as threatened or endangered; and covers 90,000 acres of right-of-way in four of CDOT’s six regions. The agencies involved sought to invest resources, which would otherwise be spent on a project-by-project clearance process, in more comprehensive and proactive species conservation that would help alleviate the need for further listings and improve predictability in the project development process. Methodologically, the project focused on impacts to habitats rather than species individuals and estimated potential impacts using best available data, supplemented by expert opinion. The resulting project offers programmatic clearance with 1:1 (that is, 1 acre of impact to 1 acre of conservation/mitigation) habitat conservation, regulatory streamlining, cost savings in several categories, and more effective habitat and species preservation. The uniqueness of this project stems from its primary focus on species currently unlisted as federally threatened or endangered, coverage of major as well as minor projects, and the scale at which conservation is being pursued, including planned preservation of approximately 15,000 to 20,000 acres from 2002 onward.
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