Determining the appropriate scope: Assessing at the ecosystem level
- Versar, Inc., Columbia, MD (United States)
Traditional approaches to determining the scope of environmental impact assessment have been based on an ad hoc selection of issues by the project proponent and other interested parties. Resulting in an inadequate consideration of both cumulative effects and impacts on biodiversity. Although public involvement in scoping the assessment must by resource-oriented, rather than activity-oriented, the appropriate scope of environmental impact assessment is the ecosystem. Drawing from the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) guidance on the consideration of biodiversity under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the growing consensus on principles of ecosystem management, scoping should begin with the large-scale ecosystem focusing on essential components potentially affected by the project to determine the appropriate bounds for the study. Although the science of analyzing ecosystems has many limitation, progress in improving environmental impact assessment can be made at any of the three increasingly difficult steps in assessing at the ecosystem level: (1) The first step involves bounding the assessment within the regional context to address cumulative effects and biodiversity. The adoption of a landscape scale has proven to be the most effective solution to the problems of setting boundaries for study units in time and space that do not omit important sources, endpoints (indicators), or processes. (2) The second step involves the use of higher-level indicators to characterize biodiversity and ecosystem integrity. Useful measures include community indices of biological integrity and landscape parameters such as habitat composition and fragmentation. (3) The third step involves identifying ecosystem thresholds (i.e., carrying capacities) to analyze the significance of cumulative impacts. Trends analysis can help identify potential threshold effects when process models are not available.
- Research Organization:
- National Association of Environmental Professionals, Washington, DC (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 125980
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-9506115-; TRN: 95:006735-0075
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 20. National Association of Environmental Professionals annual conference and exposition: environmental challenges - the next twenty years, Washington, DC (United States), 10-13 Jun 1995; Other Information: PBD: 1995; Related Information: Is Part Of Environmental challenges: The next 20 years. Proceedings; PB: 932 p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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