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Mitigation Wizard – An innovative new tool for a coordinated approach to infrastructure development and natural resource conservation

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  • Mitigation Wizard – An innovative new tool for a coordinated approach to infrastructure development and natural resource conservation
Carrie Schloss, The Nature Conservancy
Liz O'Donoghue, The Nature Conservancy
Jennie Olson, The Nature Conservancy
Advancing innovative technologies
Technical Session 27: Advances in Road Ecology - Planning for Success

Traditional, unplanned mitigation can be ineffective, expensive, risky and difficult to locate and secure. Too often, the result is piecemeal mitigation that is not aligned with regional conservation priorities and fails to effectively provide long-term protection for species or leverage nature’s other values and benefits. One solution is regional advance mitigation planning (RAMP), a landscape-scale approach to infrastructure development and natural resource conservation, aligned with regional priorities. While transportation and infrastructure planners may support a more strategic mitigation approach, they often lack easy access to the data, methods and models needed to implement RAMP as a regular practice.

The Nature Conservancy, working with transportation agencies and state and federal regulatory agencies, created the Mitigation Wizard, a free, publicly-available web-based spatial analysis and mapping tool to support more effective mitigation. Accessible through the Bay Area Greenprint, the Mitigation Wizard enables transportation and infrastructure agencies, city and regional planners, developers and community stakeholders in the San Francisco Bay Area to support better conservation outcomes by taking a landscape-scale approach to mitigation that advances regional conservation priorities and enables RAMP.

The Mitigation Wizard can help identify the potential impacts from development or infrastructure projects on special-status species and sensitive habitats and then evaluate conservation or restoration opportunities to compensate for those impacts. The tool can help infrastructure agencies, developers, natural resource agencies and conservation practitioners in the Bay Area assess and identify strategic mitigation needs and opportunities, specifically to: site projects in a way that avoids or minimizes impacts to sensitive species; identify high-value compensatory mitigation opportunities that contribute to regional conservation priorities; and combine impacts to species and habitats from multiple projects to evaluate restoration and conservation opportunities for mitigation at a landscape scale.

The Mitigation Wizard is integrated within the Bay Area Greenprint, which features extensive data and reporting on additional natural and agricultural resources that can help users evaluate and communicate the co-benefits of their mitigation projects including prioritized habitats, habitat connectivity, groundwater recharge, water and air quality, carbon sequestration and climate resilience. These landscape-scale planning tools can collectively help users assess the project impacts and mitigation benefits of a suite of projects, reduce project cost and accelerate project delivery, while ensuring mitigation funds are put to their highest use and can sustain larger-scale, more functional ecosystems.

The podium talk will include the context and drivers for building the Mitigation Wizard, the role of advisors, and a demonstration of the tool.

Climate
Mitigation
Conservation
Transportation
Land use
planning
Mapping
multi-benefit
RAMP

Header image courtesy of Martin Gradjean -- Air Traffic Network

ICOET 2025 — International Conference On Ecology and Transportation