Abstract

Projecting Wildlife Impacts from Future Oil and Gas Development: A Framework for Public Land Planning
Track: Ecology and Conservation
Author(s): Janice Thompson

Oil and gas development creates a complex network of roads, well pads, pipelines and other infrastructure across the landscape. Increasingly, scientific studies are demonstrating the negative impacts that these networks can have on wildlife. However, the federal land management planning process used for oil and gas development seldom utilizes this science to the extent required under the National Environmental Policy Act and the Data Quality Act. With the goal of changing the way future federal planning is conducted, tools and methods were developed to project wildlife impacts for a range of development alternatives. Spatial build-outs of well pads and roads were developed for a hypothetical oil and gas field for a range of well pad densities commonly proposed in land management plans. Habitat fragmentation analysis of each spatial build-out scenario lead to the development of tabular data listing the percent area of habitat experiencing direct impacts and graphs showing the area of indirect impacts. These results, used in conjunction with the appropriate biological literature on species-specific impacts, provide a means for land management agencies and stakeholder groups to quickly estimate the impacts of different development proposals. More importantly, the methods developed illustrate how site-specific build-out analysis can easily be conducted to ensure the latest science on wildlife impact analysis is incorporated as required for each federal land management plan and environmental impact statement.

Janice Thompson
The Wilderness Society
720 3rd Avenue
Suite 1800
Seattle , Washington 98104
United States
Phone: 206-624-6430
E-mail: jthomson@twsnw.org