NDLI: Challenging the practice of biodiversity offsets: ecological restoration success evaluation of a large-scale railway project

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Pöll, Constantin E. Willner, Wolfgang Wrbka, Thomas
Copyright Year	2015
Abstract	Large-scale infrastructure development projects are discussed transdisciplinarily in several domains of society. Critics often claim that environmental impact assessments lack real influence on planning, management, and monitoring. We report herein the evaluation of ecological compensation via biodiversity offsets and technical constructions with a secondary compensation function for a new railway in Austria. We asked: (1) where can ecological restoration success be detected, and (2) is our new method of a composite biotope value calculation representative for all criteria we used? We conducted a vegetation inventory on reference areas and all types of measures that created new habitats. Together with a comprehensive, spatially dense habitat mapping, evaluation of six attributes of restoration success and testing of our new method were carried out. Current threats typical for intensive agriculture have been generally reduced. Ecological compensation measures had the highest connectivity but the lowest plant community diversity. Surprisingly, technical constructions provided significantly more plant communities and hosted most Red List species. The species assemblage characteristics of compensation measures, their biotope type diversity, and their mean biotope values were, although lower, comparable to the reference. Despite the poor performance of technical areas in the final biotope values, our results call for their reconsideration as potential tools for ecological compensation by greening grey infrastructure in the near future. The tested new method provided an overall statement for the ecological restoration evaluation and could also be used for nature evidence inventories and as a valuable decision support tool in landscape planning.
Starting Page	85
Ending Page	97
Page Count	13
File Format	PDF
ISSN	18601871
Journal	Landscape and Ecological Engineering
Volume Number	12
Issue Number	1
e-ISSN	1860188X
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Japan
Publisher Date	2015-10-14
Publisher Place	Tokyo
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Ecoengineering Environmental impact statement Ecological compensation Renaturation Restoration ecology Landscape Ecology Nature Conservation Civil Engineering Environmental Management Landscape/Regional and Urban Planning Plant Ecology
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Ecology Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law Nature and Landscape Conservation

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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