Frequently Asked Questions

Mitigation banking is a large-scale ecological effort that involves the restoration, enhancement, and preservation of natural resources, including streams, wetlands, and habitat conservation areas, for the purpose of providing compensation necessary to offset unavoidable impacts to resources permitted under federal, state, or local regulations. The value of mitigation banks involves a system of credits and debits that ensures ecological loss is compensated appropriately based on the resource type to be impacted. Overall, mitigation banks provide advantage over other forms of mitigation due to their large-scale contiguous conservation techniques that eliminate uncertainty by allowing credits to be awarded as success is achieved in order to support no net loss to the environment.

Tennessee consists of numerous exceptional waters, including both streams and wetlands, and is home to one of the southeast’s most diverse aquatic resources, the Duck River. The growing population in TN will require need new and improved infrastructure that will support opportunities for future development. With this comes impacts to some of the states’ most valuable aquatic resources and the appropriate restoration and preservation of other degraded aquatic resources is important in order to offset these unavoidable impacts resulting from future development activities.

Anyone who plans to impact or degrade jurisdictional waters of the US and/or waters of the state through some form of development activity that accumulates debits and requires permitting under Section 401 and/or Section 404 of the Clean Water Act (i.e. through fill, encapsulation, removal of aquatic resource values, etc.).

Private investment through development of mitigation banks supports funding and construction of restoration projects prior to impacts occurring within a watershed, and helps to avoid temporal loss to our aquatic resources. Private investment provides financial resources that are necessary to ensure regulatory and technical goals and objectives are met for each restoration project.

For membership inquiries or questions, please reach out to Angel Fowler or TJ Mascia: info@tnrestoration.org 931.216.1638 tj.mascia@davey.com 252.723.0815

There are many factors that need to be considered when determining whether a property is suitable for ecosystem restoration. Overall, the availability of aquatic resources, viability of restoration, presence of site constraints, and ability to place a perpetual conservation easement on a property are all factors to consider, especially when determining whether the ecosystem restoration project may be used for mitigation purposes. If you are interested in pursuing potential restoration on your property and you have answered yes to the following questions, then your property may be suitable. Please reach out to TERA for additional information regarding ecological restoration in Tennessee. Is the property over 50 acres in size (deeded ground only) or has over several thousands of feet of streams? Are you willing to place a permanent conservation easement on your property and allow third parties (land trusts, public agencies, etc) to access your property occasionally, after giving proper notice? Is the property free of significant utility easements (i.e., TVA right of ways or other gas, water, sewage, and/or powerline easements)? Is there no history of industrial development or waste storage on the property? Are you looking to protect the valuable aquatic resources on your land for future generations to enjoy?