Blackberry Creek Headwaters Mitigation Bank, Campton Township

Campton Township purchased the 220-acre Blackberry Creek Headwaters Conservation Area in 2001 as part of their $18.7 Million Open Space Land Acquisition and Development Program. In order to conduct cost-effective ecological restoration of this 115-acre property, the Township selected our team to finance, design, approve, construct, and administer the Blackberry Creek Headwaters Mitigation Bank. This project involved designing, permitting, constructing, and managing a wetland mitigation bank with a long history of agricultural use and an extensive drain tile system. The agricultural portion of the property consisted of an extensive drain tile system located at the headwaters of Blackberry Creek and has been restored to a high-quality wetland and prairie complex.

Owner

Campton Township

Additional Info

Project Highlights:

To create 90 acres of wetland, we removed the drain tile system, installed groundwater monitoring wells, planted native wetland plants and established native wetland and prairie plant communities.
We conducted annual management, compliance monitoring, prescribed burning, weed control and vegetation sampling.
Phase 1 resulted in the successful restoration of 69 acres of diverse, high quality wet prairie, sedge meadow and prairie buffer. Phase 1 met all wetland mitigation banking performance standards after the five year management and monitoring period resulting in the release of all financial assurances and the certification of 48.9 credits on January 22, 2013.
A mitigation bank instrument (MBI) was approved for the expansion of Phase 2 with a total of 37.81 credits. Phase 2 met wetland hydrology performance standards in 2018 and met the interim vegetation standards in 2019 which released 13.23 credits.
Native wetland and prairie plant seed installation following drain tile disablement in both phases. Some drain tile maintained to drain upstream properties, but control structures used to force water to surface in project area.
Final wetland performance standards were met during the 2021 growing season to release the remaining 13.75 credits.