Council Staff Begin First Year of New Theme: Environmental Review

The Council selected Environmental Review because it is a common activity among Council agencies, and is an area Council agencies have identified as needing more or better resources and assistance.

Environmental Review is considered any assessment of agency activities that may have an impact on migratory birds or their habitats. Often, the agency is required to conduct such an assessment under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Other times, the agency has a need or desire to review their impacts to birds separate from NEPA, but in accordance with other statutes and policies to protect migratory birds (e.g. MBTA/BGEPA/ESA/EO13186) or agency requirements.

The Environmental Review process may include all or some and/or variations of the following elements:

• Planning - When planning to do a project or activity, what does one need to know/do in order to make sure migratory bird impacts are proactively considered and sufficiently addressed prior to construction?
• Implementation - What needs to be done to evaluate a proposed project/activity for bird presence/potential impacts?
  • Siting - What birds are in the proposed project or activity location, in what abundance, at what times of year, and what is the conservation status of those species?
  • Impact Management - What stressors are created by the project and what measures can be taken to ensure impacts are avoided or minimized to birds from the project activities throughout the year?
  • Monitoring & Reporting - How and when should monitoring be done for impacts to migratory birds from the project or activities?

As with the previous theme, Facilities Management, Council Agencies will rally around the theme in a number of ways over the next three years. This will include:

• Identifying needs for facilitating better/easier environmental review for migratory birds and working to fill these needs; and
• Sharing information about common hurdles, best practices, and tools to help with quality and efficiency of environmental reviews for migratory birds

An already initiated Council effort aimed at facilitating the environmental review process involves the work being done on development of the AKN National Node, aimed at providing a centralized location for best available bird data and decision support tools to assist in the Environmental Review process, as well as support other migratory bird conservation activities and objectives Council agencies may have.

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) also continues to develop its Information for Planning and Conservation (IPaC) system, which can currently be used to identify USFWS trust resources (refuges, fish hatcheries, T&E species) including migratory birds of concern that are potentially occurring within a given project or activity area, provide access to relevant contact information for questions and guidance, and allow users to file a request for an official species list and Ecological Services consultation. Upcoming IPaC functionality will include the ability for IPaC users to get returns of seabirds of concern in areas off the Atlantic coast (coming soon). It will also enable the delivery of graphs showing individual and aggregate levels of occurrence throughout the year for birds of concern listed as potentially occurring within a particular project or activity area (expected calendar year 2017). This information will be sourced from data within the AKN and resemble the information provided via the AKN's existing Bird Phenology Histogram Tool.

IPaC currently also links to information about migratory bird conservation measure practices, including the Nationwide Conservation Measures (measures that will help avoid and minimize bird impacts for any project or location) and various stressor and species-specific conservation measures for birds on the Migratory Bird Program Conservation Measures website. The future vision for IPaC is to provide more automated conservation measure delivery, which are specific to the species and stressors potentially present. IPaC continues to be developed and improved as a tool to facilitate the impact assessment and environmental review process for USFWS trust resources.

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service also plans to develop and Environmental Review webpage, which will provide clear and centralized guidance on the best available information and tools for each step of the environmental review process. Progress and achievements on the environmental review theme and associated activities, including the latest developments on tools like the AKN and IPaC will be highlighted regularly in upcoming CCMB Newsletters. Please stay tuned!