Assessing and Managing the Ecological Impacts of Paved Roads (2005) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
7 Integrating Obstacles and Opportunities
7 Integrating Obstacles and Opportunities
Pages 204-219
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From page 204... ...
As suggested in Chapter 1, integration is critical in two areas: integrating across scales of space and time and integrating ecological and social concerns. The first section in this chapter briefly summarizes how issues of scale influence the understanding and management of road ecology.
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From page 205... ...
impacts on wetlands and on endangered species, but insufficient consideration of how those immediate impacts relate to impacts on a greater scale. This narrowing in scope of federal statutes requiring envi
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From page 206... ...
Regional and state planning addresses such issues as economics and population growth but rarely addresses ecological concerns. Hence, most of the ongoing road assessment and planning ignores ecological structures and processes that occur at broad scales.
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From page 207... ...
The differences in paradigms, theories, methods, and practices among disciplines provide large gaps and problems in methods, approaches, and language. For example, ecologists or engineers can be very good at understanding and evaluating environmental effects but could be better trained at communicating to a wider audience or trained in alternative models of the realities of human behavior, organizational structures, and institutional arrangements.
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From page 208... ...
Differences can be resolved in a variety of ways, from discussions at workshops or public meetings to formal dispute resolution or lawsuits. The set of laws and bureaucratic structures developed to implement policy appears to generate partial solutions to a myriad of problems faced in integrating environmental concerns into all elements of road design, construction, or management.
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From page 209... ...
suggest that transportation agencies become environmental stewards and address ecological issues earlier in the planning process through improved coordination, communication, and education among the agencies. The committee suggests that integration of environmental concerns with other social objectives may be facilitated in three areas: (1)
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report (1996) , three groups (the Grand Canyon Research and Monitoring Center, the Adaptive Management Work Group, and external review groups)
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Agencies such as the Natural Resource Conservation Service now supports nurseries in 18 locales for growing seed of native plants, which can thrive in the stressful roadside conditions. Even so, entire regions do not have such native plant nurseries and still heavily use a mix of largely European plants, which have been planted along roads for decades.
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From page 212... ...
. Its waterfall masks traffic noise, and the gorge provides a quiet escape from city life.
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From page 213... ...
· Network arrangement and traffic flow affect the delivery of good and services. · The ecological landscape in which road networks are set can be influenced by road density, network structure, traffic flow, and patterns of the ecological systems in the landscape.
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From page 214... ...
In addition to peer-reviewed published studies from academic and technical centers and summaries and syntheses by professional road groups, the committee recommends the development of other learning methods -- that is, some retrospective analysis to evaluate efficacy of actions taken to avoid or mitigate ecological effects. In a sense, the approaches being applied are not solutions but rather best guesses at solutions.
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From page 215... ...
. Several ecological indicators have been proposed to measure or monitor ecological effects, and some of these indicators are applicable to road effects.
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From page 216... ...
In summary, these three reports form a body of work on indicators at the national level that can be used to guide understanding of how best to measure ecological effects of roads at the scale of the entire United States. However, many of the effects of roads occur on local or intermediate scales.
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Identifying criteria for using indicators for analyzing and addressing road effects on ecological systems might be the best way to determine the indicators most appropriate for roads effects. Cairns et al.
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From page 218... ...
scale information is more readily available and more interpretable in terms of analyzing road effects. Therefore, the committee recommends that projects designed to manage and monitor road effects should include indicators specific to the scale and concerns about the potential effects.
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From page 219... ...
. To date, attributes of road networks are not often considered in lists of ecological indicators, but road density and the spatial arrangement of new roads or roads that are removed strongly influence the ecological implications of road networks.
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