The ChicoryLane Model emerged from our efforts to improve the ecological quality of the ChicoryLane property. Others have developed approaches that overlap with the ChicoryLane perspective and practices, but differ in important ways. These differences often involve issues of scale and purpose. Scale often includes not just the size of the tract under consideration but also the energies and resources of the land owner or controlling entity. Purposes may include improving ecological quality but may focus more directly on land use issues, such as mitigation, restoration, or land development.
Concepts and practices appropriate for the individual land owner or small managing entity (e.g., operating trust) focused on improving ecological health and diversity, we will discuss with respect to the ChicoryLane Model. Concepts and practices often associated with large mitigation, restoration or other land use projects, we will discuss with respect to what we term Developer Model of Ecological Enhancement. Whereas we attempt to provide a how-to framework for the former, for the latter we introduce, following, key concepts to provide a fuller picture for larger, land development projects as well as references to facilitate further inquiry.
The term, Ecological Enhancement, seems to have emerged from the concept of Ecological Design, which dates back to the 1960s. In Sim van der Ryn's and Stewart Cowan's book by that title, they argue that human activities should be merged with natural processes to minimize negative environmental imapact. More recently, Ecological Enhancement as found its way into to world of professional designs and consultancy, particularly for landscape, environmental, and ecology services. One such firm that can be viewed as a gateway to resource materials and further inquiry is Collington Winter. They define Ecological Enhancement as follows:Ecological enhancement describes measures which can be put in place to improve the ecological condition of a site on completion of a development project. These measures can also be put in place on an alternative site if the development site cannot be enhanced.
The main difference between enhancement measures and avoidance, mitigation, and compensation measures, is that enhancement provides an improvement for the ecological environment and biodiversity in the area. Mitigation, compensation, and avoidance do not go beyond neutralizing the impacts of the development, and achieving “no net loss” for biodiversity.
Within a land development context, much of the emphasis is placed on the notion of Biological Net Gain: to leave the environment in a measurably better state than before the development took place. Implicit in this definition is the notion that biodiversity should me measured before and after development and that differences can be calculated and reported as enhancement.
Such work requires rigorous and extensive ecological research as well as authoritative support.
In England, this support has been provided by Natural England, a non-departmental public body established in 2006 and aligned with the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs office. They have done extensive work to define key concepts, develop templates and guidelines for measuring biodiversity and other parameters of ecological health, as well as online spreadsheet-like tools for recording both objective measures and expert judgements of ecological attributes. These tools allow recording numerous measures based on expert assesmment of individual areas of a project and then aggregating these measures in accord with their weighted impact on the area affected. See, for example, Natural England Biodiversty Metric 3.1 - Auditing and Accounting for Diversity Calculatorr and its accompanying Biodiversty Metric 3.1 - User Guide.
A project area is identified.
That overal areas is divided into smaller area on the basis of particular ecological properties that differentiate them from other areas.
A map is produced, with precise measures of area or extent.
Outside informations is gathered and analyzed
Ecological experts and other technical specialists visit the site, perhaps multiple times, and for each area assign scaled qualittive scores for a variety of factors