Brett Ostby comments on EAW -Part 1
Disclosure: I am a biologist that studies river ecology and endangered species. My work is often used to inform environmental impact studies and prescribe mitigations. The comments presented here were prepared on behalf of the non-profit, Save-the-Rookery. I presently serve on the board of this non-profit. I volunteered to be on the board and was not recruited. Comments do not reflect the views of my employer. My work was not compensated, nor do I expect compensation.
The greater Rochester community has clearly expressed a desire to preserve a forest harboring the Great Blue Heron Rookery located in Rochester Township. When duly notified, citizens have repeatedly spoken against government actions allowing the process toward development of the Connelly Property (Pavilion Estates Subdivision) to continue. At several steps, citizens have demonstrated that converting this forest to suburban development would be an irreparable loss for Rochester Township, Olmsted County and Minnesota. The collective actions of citizens in this process have been unfairly dismissed in the EAW. Citizens from Rochester Township and greater Minnesota who have spoken against this development have been labeled as “activists” and have their motives questioned. In the EAW, Rochester Township failed to accurately document work of its constituents in the timeline and, instead, allowed the EAW authors to present an incomplete timeline of this democratic process. The language and incomplete timeline contradict the Township’s stated goal to remain impartial. The EAW has not acknowledged that the Rookery and forest are so valued that citizens have formed a non-profit, whose mission is to purchase the land for permanent preservation as a Scientific and Natural and Area (SNA). Such actions demonstrate wide-spread support and commitment to conservation of Great Blue Herons, their habitats and forests in Olmsted County. I brought these issues to the attention of the Rochester Township Board chair Matt Kitzmann, along with other flaws that make navigating and reading the EAW difficult, in a phone conversation on July 20th, 2021. At that time, I requested the Township Board and the TCPA have the EAW author correct basic errors and address readability.
Some specific issues that the Township failed to address include:
Improper and incomplete citations of articles in Xenops report (PDF pages 111-132). This is no “Literature Cited” or “Reference” section.
An illegible figure with key data on PDF page 157. This image could have been easily prepared using GoogleEarthTM.
Incomplete citations making verification of source material difficult.
Appendix of cited articles with abstracts not properly linked to public sources (PDF
pages 168-173). Links take the reader to a password protected location for St. Mary’s
University via browser.
No index for abbreviations making this document difficult to read. It is common
practice for documents meant for the general public and for professionals outside of
technocratic circles to have a list or index of abbreviations.
No Table of Contents and confusing organization.
Beyond specific editorial issues, this document is difficult to navigate. It is an unfair burden on the citizen reviewer and township officers. There is no table of content or structure. There is no executive summary. The EAW has no coherent direction, with supporting documents, timelines, figures and conclusions spread through. This further demonstrates the EAW was, at best, prepared in haste. At worst, it is an intentional data dump meant to confuse and overwhelm the reader. Whether intentional or prepared in haste, this entire document is an exercise in obfuscation. This attempt to rush the environmental review process thwarts democracy. Despite these warnings, the Rochester Township forwarded a poorly written, biased, and incomplete document to the EQB. The Rochester Township Board is fully responsible for allowing this document to be released for public review before it was ready.
The EAW downplays the significance of the ecosystem on the Connelly Property by arguing that Great Blue Herons are “ubiquitous” and that forest ecosystem and Cascade Creek are degraded resources of little “value”. The repeated use of both terms—ubiquitous and value— is problematic and bias. “Value” is rarely used by the State of Minnesota in describing ecosystems and natural resources, and when it is used, it is constrained by precise language with meaningful context. The use of these terms in the EAW are bias toward perceptions of the developer. If the debate is over value, an economist with experience in quantifying ecosystem services and wildlife losses ought to be consulted. A more prudent or objective approach would be to eliminate these terms from usage here if the Rochester Township intends the EAW to be impartial. I will continue to use these terms in this review to demonstrate their lack of scientific rigor and precision, and how both are used to mislead the reader, and are therefore open to alternative interpretation.
The EAW argues the forest ecosystem of the Connelly Property and reach of the Cascade Creek flowing through this property are degraded and therefor are of limited “value”. These conclusions lack context. Almost all forests and streams in Olmsted County are degraded. In fact, the complete 1997 Olmsted County Biological Survey map, of which only a portion is presented in the EAW2, demonstrates that only 2.2% of Olmsted County lands were considered Natural Communities in 1997 (Appendix A). The Minnesota Biological Survey (MBS) has been intentionally precise in definition of natural communities so as to distinguish from other public and private lands with varying ecological significance and “value”. The MBS does not document waters and lands providing valued ecological services and/or conventional utilitarian services, including but not limited to water quality protection, vegetative protection of erodible lands, fisheries, hunting grounds, recreational areas, ecological restoration and mitigation projects, and corridors necessary to maintain wildlife and native plants across space and time. A natural community is strictly defined by the MBS as
groups of plants and animals that interact with each other and their abiotic environment in ways not greatly altered by modern human activities or by introduced organisms . . . [97.8% of Olmsted County] on the map represent land where modern human activities such as farming, overgrazing, nonsustainable logging, draining, and residential and commercial development have destroyed or greatly altered natural vegetation.
Almost the entirety of Olmsted County and greater southeast Minnesota have been deforested, plowed or modified since European settlement. Every stream has been directly or indirectly modified. Few if any undisturbed areas persist into the 21st century. Areas appearing natural to the untrained eye have recovered from direct or indirect human disturbance. If we were to follow the logic of this EAW, the majority of public natural areas and waters in Olmsted County, and greater southeast Minnesota would be low-value ecosystems in some form of recovery from disturbance (including but not limited to most of Oxbow Park, large portions of Chester Woods Park, Quarry Hill Park and its restored Oak Savannah, Gordon Y. Yeager WMA, Schumann WMA, Lake Shady Restoration Project, Prairie Crossing Park, Essex Park, Gamehaven Regional Park). Nonetheless, lands and waters of Olmsted County support many rare and endangered species, including but not limited to the Peregrine Falcon, Blanding’s Turtle, Rusty Patched Bumble Bee, Elktoe Mussel, and Leedy's Roseroot. These lands and streams are often in states of natural recovery, managed/anthropogenic recovery or disturbed by past/present land use.3 These lands, though degraded and not meeting the threshold of natural plant community status according to MBS, or high Fish IBI scores provide countless ecosystem services, some of which can be estimated in dollars. For example, having extensively studied the reach of the South Fork Zumbro River below Silver Lake over the last year, I can state that it is occupied by several state-listed species and provides habitat for highly “valued” Walleye and Smallmouth Bass. Yet this fishery resource is not mapped as part of the MBS and is likewise considered impaired by MPCA. It is degraded but provides services. Other services and uses cannot be monetized because they are “valued” by citizens for aesthetics and quality of life. So to better understand the conclusions of the MBS, and better understand why the EAW claims the Connelly Property has little value, the actual reports and raw data for MBS studies (both 1997 and 2015) should be shared as an appendix in the EAW. I request that the report be shared or that raw data be provided for review as part of an EIS.
So as to not trespass, I have not set foot on the Connelly Property but have walked the neighbor’s adjoining lands and viewed the Connelly Property from the property line. Forests in lands contiguous to the Connelly Property support many native species, including native spring ephemeral flowers, grasses and mature trees. For example, Sweet Cicely, Yellow Trout Lily, Wild Ginger, Wood Nettles, Canadian Anemone, Blue Cohosh, Gooseberry and Maidenhair Fern are present and abundant. Turkey, Red Bellied Woodpeckers, warblers and many other native birds are present. I suspected the biomass of native fauna and flora exceeds invasives by several orders of magnitude. The list of natives could be easily expanded to include dozens if not hundreds of native forbs, shrubs, grasses, trees, mammals and birds. This count far exceeds that of any suburban lawn or development proposed to replace the forest. I concur with the EAW that non-native, invasive species are present and a problem. However, the condition of the forest on the Connelly Property and neighboring lands is not unlike those in parks of regional significance, including Chester Woods and Quarry Hill. Managers of these “valued” public lands constantly struggle to contain Reed Canary Grass, Buckthorn and Garlic Mustard4. In fact, many public lands are over-run with these species.5 Invasives identified in the EAW are also present on many state WMAs, SNAs, forests, recreational areas and parks.
The EAW does not accurately account for present biodiversity, nor place that biodiversity in its regional or historical context. In fact, when the EAW was submitted, and by the author’s admission, a search of the state’s Natural Heritage Database had not yet been completed. This search should have been completed in early phases of the environmental review. If I had been the consultant on this project, I would have suggested a search as one of the first steps in environmental review. This procedural oversight alone demonstrates that the environmental review is incomplete and another reason that an EIS is needed to better account for biodiversity. Neither the EAW author nor any subconsultants whose work was cited in the EAW appear qualified to assess the native plant communities. The DNR maintains a list of approved surveyors for such work (Appendix B). Nonetheless the EAW assigned a value based on the presence of invasives and MBS classification.
The EAW failed to classify the state of the forest using accurate and precise, ecological terms. The history of tree harvest also does not match with claims of the forest’s “value”. While the soils6 and geology have been accurately and precisely described, the work of experienced forest ecologists, such as Dr. Lee E. Frelich (work cited by others in the EAW review) have provided an entirely different accounting of the forest ecosystem. The forest has a mature canopy contiguous with neighboring properties, the canopy even extends over Cascade Creek. Using aerial images available on GoogleEarthTM , I calculated the forest was approximately 140 acres in extent (Figure 1). This does not include areas connected to other forested patches by intentionally restored areas (such as restored prairie to the west, 44.014988, -92.553810) and areas in recovery from past agricultural/pasture use to the north. This contiguous and dense forest stands out in an examination of the 2016 CONUS Tree Canopy GIS layer that can be viewed on https://www.mrlc.gov/viewer/ (Figures 2 and 3). This forest is among the darker green areas (measure of intensity) and among the larger of those persisting in Olmsted County that are not on highly erodible and steep slopes of the Zumbro, Root, and Whitewater river valleys. It is an especially significant high-density canopy for those forests surrounding and within the City of Rochester proper. It goes against the fundamentals of ecology and cumulative analysis classifications to consider the 30-acre without context of the greater whole of which it is part. These discrepancies and failure to accurately characterize the forest ecosystem demonstrates the EAW is incomplete and that an EIS is needed to accurately account for the “value” of the forest.
The value of forests in general is well-documented and one of the reasons the City of Rochester is presently developing an Urban Forest Master Plan. Given that the City of Rochester determined benefits of the 41,177 trees comprising the urban forest7:
saved a collective $197,091 in electricity costs,
provided $719,284 benefit to water quantity and quality,
saved $350,6237 in natural gas costs
slowed the flow of 26,541,827 gallons of rainfall that would flood rivers and urban
lands
sequestered 4,074,152 pounds of CO2 – the major contributor to climate change, and
removed 33,100 pounds of air pollutants
annually, why should this development be allowed to remove 17.6 acres of forest and call it anything by a loss of ecosystem service to Rochester Township and Olmsted County? The EAW has not accurately addressed the extent, irreversible and cumulative loss of services provided by the removals of 17.6 acres of forest.
Continuing with accurate accounting of biodiversity, on print page 52, the EAW states:
a. A visual inspection of the stream bed and stream corridor did not identify any live mussels and found no mussel shells.
b. MNDNR maps of the occurrence of rare, endangered, or threatened mussels show these species are present far downstream near the confluence with the South
Branch of the Zumbro River.
The first statement is misleading and not made by a state-recognized expert. The second statement lacks context and proper citation. The lack of mussel shells does not indicate absence of freshwater mussels. I have conducted thousands of surveys across the United States and found that shell material can be absent when mussels occupy a habitat. This is due to many reasons, including but not limited to local stream hydraulics and geomorphology, water quality, and shell characteristics of species present (shell thickness and durability of shell material varies greatly among our native species). Presence/absences of shell material is but one of several factors used to describe a native mussel assemblage and determine whether protected species are present. Had the EAW authors employed one of the state-approved mussel surveyors to investigate the site, this statement would have context. State-approved surveyors should be hired to investigate the site as several native species have been documented downstream (see Appendix C). As for the second statement, there is no reference to which records of occurrences have been reviewed and the EAW makes clear data from the heritage database (PDF page printed page number 42) had not been reviewed prior to submittal. Moreover, occurrence records only confirm the presence of rare, endangered, or threatened species. Such records do not confirm absences and a review of survey effort is needed to determine whether effort was sufficient to detect rare species (such information could be gleaned from an examination of heritage metadata or from the report on which the MBS assessment was based or WHAF data was based). Typically, 1500 square meters (m2) need to be searched to detect a population of 0.01 mussels per square meter (Smith 2005). I doubt the EAW authors searched 1500 m2 of stream.8 A 2003 report by Marian Havlik (Havlik 2003)9 documented over 186 specimens representing 5 native species approximately 4 stream miles from the Connelly Property. These species often co-occur with state-listed species and the author of that reports suspected as much and had requested permission to conduct further study of the area. I could find no record of additional searches. There are other records from the statewide mussel survey for Cascade Creek that should be reviewed, including that survey completed for the Cascade Creek restoration project (print page 52). This is yet another aspect of the EAW that is incomplete and misleading on this specific account of native biodiversity.
Photo by William Welke