CSA International, Inc.’s Coastal Restoration business line provides professional, experienced services to assess, enhance, rehabilitate, and monitor marine habitats damaged and/or at risk from proposed actions, accidents, and natural events. Primary objectives of restoration include accelerating habitat recovery and reducing liability for lost ecological services associated with natural resource damage.
CSA staff are trained and equipped to conduct surveys of hard bottom habitats, coral reefs, oyster banks, seagrass beds, and other soft bottom habitats in connection with environmental permitting, marine construction, legal settlement claims, dredging projects, habitat reclamation, and vessel grounding events. To facilitate monitoring, such projects may require habitat creation, restoration, repair of injured biotic communities, and collection of baseline data. CSA International, Inc. has developed and field-tested new methods for reattaching and transplanting hard corals in addition to having designed and installed innovative reef structural habitat enhancements as a means of accelerating biological recovery. CSA also is experienced in conducting seagrass restoration and applying structural augmentation as a component of habitat reclamation.
Determining lost services for habitat injuries and the assessment of injury type and severity are primary services that CSA conducts for coastal restoration clients. CSA International, Inc. personnel expertly conduct Habitat Equivalency Analyses (HEA) and frequently use the resulting analyses for assessment of restoration and mitigation strategies. HEA, which determines appropriate compensation for lost ecological services, is a common method used to value injuries to natural resources from ship groundings, oil spills, and other anthropogenic incidents. As a result of having conducted a multitude of HEAs for impacts to natural resources from marine construction activities and vessel groundings, CSA is experienced in scaling variables (e.g., habitat recovery time) and evaluating the cost basis for HEA component.
