[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, and thanks for joining our Intro to NRDAR, or Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration, presentation at the TLEF 2021 Conference. There are a couple of things that have changed in our presentation since last year. So I wanted to give you an update. There will not be a Tribal NRDAR Workshop this fall here in 2021. We had one last year, but we do hope to have one again soon. We do have a few more cases than we did last year when we presented, and all of that information is available on our website. And we won't be available for questions at the end because this is an on-demand presentation this year. But what didn't change is all of the information examples provided and our contact info. Here's the email and the website where you can reach us and find out more about our program. I'll also be doing a DOI Restoration Planning, Implementation, and Monitoring presentation on Tuesday, August 17, at 10:30 Pacific time if you're interested in learning a little bit more about the NRDAR process after you watch this on-demand program. Thank you and enjoy. Welcome to Introduction to Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration, or NRDAR 101. Presenters are myself, Emily Joseph, and Becky McEwen from the Department of the Interior's NRDAR program. The goal of our presentation today is to provide you with an understanding of what the damage assessment and restoration process is and how tribes are involved. We'll introduce you to some basic terminology and showcase examples of successful NRDAR projects with tribal involvement. There will be a chance to ask questions after the presentation. So stick around. We look forward to talking with you at the end. To start, we wanted to give you a little bit of background on our office and what we do. My name is Emily Joseph and I work in the Office of Restoration and Damage Assessment at the Department of Interior. Working with the DOI bureaus, we manage the department's NRDAR program. As you can see from the slide, our responsibilities vary from administering the Restoration Fund, providing funding to case teams, communicating and conducting outreach to the field, as well as interacting with our code trustees. Specifically, I run the Operations unit for the Office, which is responsible for overseeing the annual damage assessment funding process; the office's information management system, or DARTS, which you'll see and hear about later in the presentation; as well as the inland oil spill preparedness project, which is tasked with planning and preparing the department for any potential inland oil spills which could impact departmental resources. And I represent the restoration support unit, which, as the name states, supports restoration efforts, including planning, implementation, partnerships, monitoring, environmental compliance, and more. As Emily stated, we are part of the DOI restoration program, which serves all of the Department of Interior bureaus with jurisdiction over resources that they manage, including Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, National Park Service, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The NRDAR program also involves, either in conjunction with or as their own claimant, other federal agencies, such as NOAA or the US Forest Service, state agencies, and you, the tribal representatives. The goal of our program is to evaluate and then restore wildlife, habitat, and human resources impacted by oil spills or hazardous substance releases. What exactly is NRDAR? Let's watch this video and see. Hello, and welcome to this brief introduction to Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration, also known as NRDAR. Within the US Department of the Interior, we use the NRDAR process to evaluate injuries to public natural resources following a toxic spill or release and assist in the restoration. Why do we need NRDAR? When oil and hazardous substances are spilled or released into the environment, public natural resources may be injured or destroyed. Federal law provides that these natural resources should be restored or replaced. That's why several laws were passed. The Clean Water Act is the primary law regulating water quality and pollution in the United States. The Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act, a.k.a. Superfund, provides federal authority to respond to and clean up spills and hazardous waste sites. And the Oil Pollution Act improved the government's ability to respond to oil spills in the nation's waters. So what does this process look like? Well, when harmful substances are released into the environment, local fish, wildlife, and plants can be injured, and the public's use of these resources may be impaired. NRDAR conducts investigations to determine the nature, extent, and severity of this injury and how it might be fixed. We work with other federal, state, and tribal government partners as natural resource trustees acting on behalf of the public during this process. Next, a claim is resolved through settlement or, in rare cases, through litigation. Lastly, funds recovered are used to restore, replace, enhance, or protect the natural resources affected, or to compensate the public for the lost use of the resource. While this may sound simple, it requires understanding a wide range of complex ecosystems around the US and the unique public resources associated with each. The NRDAR program allows Americans to continue to enjoy public natural resources that are safe for recreation. Visit doi.gov/restoration for more information. [MUSIC PLAYING] So maybe you saw some terms you're familiar with-- Clean Water Act, CERCLA, a.k.a. Superfund, and OPA, or Oil Pollution Act. Those are the authorities guiding us and the restoration we assist with. And maybe some of you are more familiar with what happens before restoration-- remediation and oil spill response. EPA is often involved in this part, and we can be involved also, as the earlier we are brought in, the better the restoration outcomes can be. So now we'll talk more about the process and how you are involved. Trustees. Who exactly are the trustees involved in the NRDAR process? As you saw from the video, federal agencies, tribes, and states are designated under the National Contingency Plan, or NCP, to act on behalf of the public as trustees for natural resources. On the federal side, the NCP designates five specific federal agencies with this responsibility. The first one is our department, Department of the Interior, and we work through our five bureaus, which you saw in the previous slide, the BIA, the BLM, Bureau of Reclamation, Fish and Wildlife Service, and Park Service. The second, Department of Commerce, works through the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. The third, US Department of Agriculture, works with the Forest Service. The remaining two federal agencies are the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy. For state, governors have this responsibility, which is typically designated to the departments responsible for either environmental protection or fish and wildlife management. For tribes, federally recognized tribes are designated this responsibility as part of the NRDAR process. What are the activities and roles of trustees as part of this process? As mentioned, the federal agencies, the states, and the tribes are considered trustees for national resources. Working together, trustees can pool their personnel, their experience, and their expertise. Working collaboratively improves the efficiency and effectiveness of the process and helps in establishing a strength in numbers, unified approach as everyone works together to focus on mutually beneficial outcomes. Working together includes the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding, an MOU, among the trustees to form a trustee council. This organizational structure is essential to conduct the NRDAR. It specifies who's involved in the NRDAR, what the purpose of the group is, everyone's functions, duties, and responsibilities, how decisions will be made, and helps to define the goals for the group when working together. So what are the federal trustees responsible for? Lots of land and the services those lands provide, both as havens for people and animals. This slide outlines the approximate acreage each bureau manages, but what to note is the responsibility for migratory birds, threatened endangered species, and anadromous fish, many of which are controlled by Fish and Wildlife Service and why they're one of our biggest partners on trustee councils. What is important to note is it's that nexus to these resources that is needed to file a claim. As stated earlier, NOAA is often a trustee because they have responsibility for migratory birds, threatened/endangered species, and anadromous fish. I say that they have responsibility for marine lands, habitats, and species, which include migratory birds often. They may also be the primary only trustee on their own case. The same is true for other common federal trustees-- Forest Service, DOE, and DOD, though we all know some cases have them on both sides of the claim. Tribal trusteeship. Tribal trustees are generally defined as federally recognized tribes. As you recall in the video, two of the main regulations which guide our program are CERCLA, or Superfund, and the Oil Pollution Act, or OPA. Under CERCLA, any federally recognized tribe has NRDAR responsibilities over any national resources belonging to, managed by, controlled by, or appertaining to such tribe, or held in trust for the benefit of such tribe. Under OPA, federally recognized tribes with governmental authority over land belonging to or controlled by the tribe have NRDAR responsibilities. To put it in easier to understand terms, a tribe is considered a trustee if the spill or hazardous substance released has injured the lands or resources they manage. For states, the same applies. States have responsibility for lands they own, any state threatened and endangered species, any state fish and wildlife resources, surface and groundwater, and any state specific issues. So we've talked about the trustees and their roles and responsibilities and what they manage. So maybe now you're wondering if your tribe might have a claim. As with many things, it depends. As stated in the regulations, NRDAR claims must include land, fish, wildlife belonging to, managed by, held in trust by, appertaining to, or otherwise controlled by the United States, the states, Indian tribes, or foreign governments, and the lost services provided by those species or habitats. The NRDAR process does not provide a mechanism for claims if the only injury or for the part of the injury that is related to such things as human health, livestock, or private property. There are other sources for claims of those natures through OPA, [? NPSE, ?] or through EPA. So you said yes, I might have a claim. So next, you should consider the following items before you proceed. One, was there an incident? Two, was there an injury? Three, do I have the data or can I get the data to support that claim? And four, will response or remediation actions not repair the injury? If you can't say yes to all of these, stop. You may not have what is needed to file a claim. If you can say yes, then the next step is the assessment phase of NRDAR, which determines the type and extent of the injuries. And now for the specifics related to the NRDAR process. In the previous slides, you saw who is designated as a trustee in the NRDAR process. Following the questions and answers, which Becky laid out, you've confirmed that there is, in fact, a NRDAR case. Therefore, the first step is to figure out the injury. Working together with your co-trustees, you will determine the injury to the natural resources from the oil spill or release of hazardous substances. What exactly is meant by injury? Injury is defined as a measurable or observable adverse change in the quality by ability or value of the natural resources and services they provide. It's not the same as risk. It's defined in the regulation, and it applies to individual species which have been injured. How will you figure out that there actually have been a change? The concept of baseline is critical for this part of the process. What was the condition of the natural resources prior to or but for the spill or release of hazardous substances? To get that information, you can use historical data, published literature, research, local and indigenous knowledge. This information will be important as it can be used as a reference area data for you and your fellow trustees as you plan the scientific studies and economic analyses you'll do to determine and quantify the injury. Damages. In order to assess damages for the injuries to recover and restore resources and services, you'll need to conduct various studies and/or perform economic analyses as part of your claim. Ecological studies and biological and chemical analyses are used to evaluate the extent of injuries to plants and animals. Many types of data can be collected, including water, sediment and tissue samples, surveys of fish, shellfish, and vegetation, and aerial photography and satellite imagery. Economic analyses help to identify and quantify effects on recreational uses, such as boating and fishing, as well as help identify losses of tribal cultural services. Based on the data and information collected, trustees determine the nature and extent of impacts to habitat and biological communities. In doing so, trustees consider the duration of the injury and the time it will take for injured resources to recover. Economic tools are used to identify and calculate how recreational use of natural resources, such as beach access, fishing, and boating have been impacted. All of this information will be used to develop restoration plans and select restoration projects that will compensate the public for impacts to natural resources. What exactly are damages? Legally speaking, damages are the monies you'll receive to pay for all of the assessment costs you incurred for the ecological studies you conducted or the surveys you conducted, and the time you spent working on the case. Additionally, the money you'll receive will include cost for restoration-- the planning, managing, and monitoring of the restoration. The regulations direct trustees to estimate the potential restoration benefits to help quantify the damages and guide restoration implementation and planning. With input from the public, you'll work with your other trustees to select the appropriate restoration activities. These projects are intended to compensate the public for both injuries to natural resources and lost recreational uses, from the time of injury until the resources are fully recovered. So we've determined that there was an injury, assessed the damages for that injury, and usually by this point, cleanup has occurred and the site has been remediated if necessary. So now we're ready to get to the good part-- restoration. Restoration includes both returning injured resources to the condition they would have been if the release or discharge had not occurred-- the baseline when possible-- and replacing the services that were lost while the resources were injured by that substance released or discharged oil. NRDAR always leans towards the restoration of natural resources. There are two types of restoration-- primary and compensatory. Primary restoration focus on returning that resource to its baseline as determined during the assessment. Compensatory is the restoration that attempts to replace lost services, the use of those injured resources. What exactly are we working to restore in all of these cases? For ecological restoration, which is the primary restoration, it is addressing the species entered, the land impacted, and the supporting environment. Examples of projects include creating wetlands, removing invasive species or a fish barrier, or simply planting trees. Compensatory restoration often focuses on the lost service, the lost opportunities of enjoying those species and environments and the sustenance they provide, both physically, economically, culturally, and spiritually. Examples of this type of restoration include connecting to resources on and off the reservation, restoring lakes and hunting grounds, and establishing programs to share tribal ecological knowledge. Next, let's see where the cases are and some examples of successful restoration. As we mentioned before, our office has an information management system we use to house information on all of our NRDAR cases. We call our system DARTS, the Damage Assessment and Restoration Tracking System. It has a public facing website and an internal side. Here's a screenshot of the public website where we currently have 285 cases, which are an assessment restoration or a closed. In order to be displayed publicly, the case must have a public document available. Therefore, if you are aware of a case and don't see it, it could be that it's just not currently displayed as of yet, as we're waiting to have a publicly available document to post. This website is available for anyone to access and take a look at the cases in their area. You can filter by type of case-- oil, mining, or chemical-- the status, and where it's located. Information on how to access this website will be shown at the end of the presentation. Another filter which could be used to sort cases is by the trustees involved. Applying that filter, you can see that of the 285 public cases, approximately 14% have one or more tribes as trustees. As shown on this map, there are several in the Northwest, the Great Lakes area, the New England area, Oklahoma, and the Southwest. From this slide you can see a few examples of our DOI NRDAR cases with tribal trustees, which you may be familiar with. There's the Tri-State Mining District, Tar Creek case in Oklahoma, which has several tribes involved, the Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, case, which has the Coeur d'Alene tribe, there's our Fox River case in Wisconsin, which is a PCB case, there's the New Carissa oil spill in Oregon, and there's the Commencement Bay, Washington, oil spill, or chemical case, excuse me, which is one of our oldest NRDAR cases. Another one of our cases with tribal involvement is the St. Lawrence case in New York. Fish, NOAA, State of New York, and the St. Regis Mohawk tribe work together as co-trustees on this case. As part of the $8.4 million settlement in 2013 with Alcoa/Reynolds, one of the restoration projects selected was to support traditional Mohawk cultural practices. They developed a master apprenticeship program to teach the Mohawk language and traditional teaching. This program was created to establish and directly support long-term master apprenticeship relationships in the four areas of traditional cultural practices, which were harmed by the release of hazardous contaminants, and promote and support the regeneration of practices associated with traditions in these four areas. The four areas are water-- fishing and use of the St. Lawrence River; horticulture and basket making; medicinal plants and healing; and hunting and trapping. By selecting this restoration project, they connected the restoration to the service which was lost by the hazardous substance release, the fundamental basis of the NRDAR process. Our next example is out of a story map. And forgive me while I have to switch screens. Story Maps are a journalistic and geospatial tool being used to tell stories of all kinds. This example of a restoration project in Michigan resulting from a spill in 2010 along the Enbridge River, where a pipeline ruptured, creating the largest inland oil spill to date and, unfortunately, harming many animals and requiring several years of cleanup. Restoration included restoration of habitat for injured animals and wetlands, as well as compensatory restoration for the loss of recreation services. I know I'm scrolling through this quickly. But it is a very big story map. And we don't have time for it. There will be a talk about this case at the NRDAR tribal workshop in October. And a link to this or other story maps can also be provided. And the restoration support unit can help you create a story map for your case, if you wish. I'm now going to switch screens again to show you another example. This next example is a restoration video created by an order intern, Taylor Hensel, that outlines the collaborative project with a Sequoyah National Wildlife Refuge and Roger Kane, the principal investigator for the Cherokee Nation River Cane Initiative and his quest to recover this very important and endangered plant we hope his efforts will be applied to restoration cases in the area. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - Weapon, for food. River can here is not covered in 2% of the landscape on our own tribal land. These very endangered ecosystems are here. And we're not doing anything to protect them. It's part of our geographic cultural identity. River cane's a fractal. I'm into fractals. I'm a former high school math teacher. And even when it's about this tall, it looks like that. Even when it's 20 foot tall, it looks like that. And that's just too cool, the tops of it and everything. And it's just that's how you can tell the age right there. The more leaves it has on it, the older it is. And then this right here, this always tells you it's less than three years old. My name's Roger Cain. I'm the principal investigator for the Cherokee Nation River Cane Initiative. What we've been doing so far is just mapping cane breaks on tribal land. And we're about to complete a five-year study on three counties within the 14 county jurisdictional boundary of Cherokee Nation. And looking at the technology and the aspects of how river cane grows and finding out nobody's really studied it and it's a plant that's really important to our culture and our history, and so being able to rediscover it, share what we learned with everybody, it's a good feeling. We use it for our houses. We made houses out of it. We made the walls. Matter of fact, when DeSoto was coming through the Southeast, especially in the Cherokee country, they interpreted the houses for meaning basket house. The carpet was the river cane mat. The siding was river can siding. Tops were made out of river cane mattings, or they were made out of poplar bark. River is also important to the Choctaw, the Chickasaw. All the Southeastern Woodland tribes, we all used river cane at some point in our cultural history. The Cherokee Nation River Cane Initiative, out of that 70 acres, none of it is comparable or even near the quality of this piece of cane right here that you need to make blowguns, that you need to make baskets with and leather materials with. So what's going on is a lot of it's getting mowed down. It's getting eat up. Or it's just getting outmaneuvered by privet, which is an invasive species. Or it's just the trees. It's still there. And that's one of the reasons we need to find it. And now we need to develop strategies to protect it. And it's sure be here in 10 years, 20 years, 100 years possibly. I've been doing this for about 20 years or so. So I'm really into doing it for a baskets and cultural stuff, art stuff. But as far as tribal land, it's something we'll get together with a couple other people within the tribe and develop comprehensive strategies that will ensure that we can meet it. It's a neat partnership with the Sequoyah Refuge with the Cherokee Nation, where they have the land. And they have the willingness to try things that have never been done before. And they had to use that kind of money to restore another part of the refuge. And so they put that money into river cane. 34 acres of river cane there on a refuge that Cherokee Nation, Choctaw Nation, and federally recognized tribes will be able to have access to river cane for their cultural projects. And we'll work with them on gathering strategies and minimum and maximum, stuff like at. - The refuge has bottomland hardwood forests that are regenerating after the flooding of the reservoir. And so the cane is an important component of bottomland hardwood forests. And it's one of the most threatened ecosystems in North America. So a lot of people that are focusing on bottomland hardwood forest restoration and management efforts are also trying to incorporate the cane breaks as a vital component of that. Canes have disappeared. So have those species declined. - It's a plant now that has some good environmental impact for us. It's good for our water. It's good for reducing pollutants in our streams. And it's something that, scientifically, has been proven that it's really good reducing nitrogen and phosphorus runoff. And that's something that's impacting all of our waterways now. And I think river cane is a possible answer for it. If anything, get more of it out there for preservation of these ecosystems, these very endangered ecosystem, as well as for the cultural aspect and having Native people help manage it. And that's what, again, the Cherokee Nation River Cane is about is getting Native people more involved in our history and culture, especially environmentally. We need to rediscover our past and look how this past is going to help us in the future now. [END PLAYBACK] In summary, NRDAR is restoration focused. Restoration should be considered early and throughout the process. Restoration must be linked to the injury. It's cooperative. Getting to restoration requires a common vision based on sound science. Coordination with potential responsible parties, cotrustees, and the public is key. And it's also a legal process. You must demonstrate a connection between the release and the injury. The polluter is responsible for reasonable cost of assessment and restoration. We hope you enjoyed our presentation today. If you're interested in participating in our monthly NRDAR tribal call, please contact Ramona Turner, so you can be added to our listserv. Her contact info is shown here on this slide. We've also included our email address in case you have any questions or issues do you think of later if you'd like to discuss. And please do check out our website, www.doi.gov/restoration, where you can see more of the activities we're involved with. And you can access the map we showed you earlier in the presentation. Thank you so much for joining us today. We look forward to answering any questions you may have. Thank you.
Intro to Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration- NRDAR 101
From ITEP Team July 26th, 2021
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