Building Effective Compensatory Marine Habitat for Arctic Ports

Installation of effective compensatory habitat is an important regulatory requirement for port projects in North America. Habitat compensation and offsetting is engineered habitat that is intended to compensate for alterations, destruction and/or disruptions of natural habitat caused by a project. The recent push for port development in the Arctic has created a need for effective and feasible compensatory habitat strategies for large-scale projects. Typical strategies utilized in temperate climates are not necessarily feasible for Arctic projects because of various environmental factors including limited biological knowledge and frequent disturbance by ice. Therefore, projects are generally limited to lower productivity compensation projects such as physical habitat construction which increases habitat complexity and diversity. Moreover, monitoring the success of Arctic compensation projects is a major challenge due to biological and logistical restrictions, such as a short growing seasons, lack of biological indicator species, temporal habitat utilization by motile species and limited access for data collection. Arctic habitat compensation projects can also be cost-prohibitive due to the remoteness of field sites and limited availability of on-site resources. This paper discusses the challenges and lessons learned from habitat compensation projects associated with recent WorleyParsons port developments in Nunavut, Canada.