 Good afternoon everyone, hopefully you're all still with us after having a big hearty lunch there. As Greg said, I'm with Ducks Unlimited, I've been with them since about 2014. We do a third party wetland mitigation program. I'm going to take you through some of the things that we look at when we're pursuing projects and there's going to be a heavy influence for mitigation on this. We also do a lot of general restoration private land work with producers throughout the state. But mitigation is actually a fairly small part of what Ducks Unlimited does across the country, but it's kind of a growing industry and a growing part of DU. So a little bit about Ducks Unlimited. I can serve, restore, manage wetlands and associated habitats for North America's waterfall and these habitats also benefit other wildlife and people which will come into play later. DU started in 1937 in the middle of the drought. For about 40 or 50 years, all the money that was raised in the United States was sent to Canada to the Prairie Pothole region where they worked north of the border. It wasn't until 1984 when they opened the Bismarck office and the first Ducks Unlimited project was actually at Lake Arena northeast of Bismarck in 1984. This office is the regional headquarters for seven states, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming. So we have about 35 employees in Bismarck and then a few satellite offices in those other states. Prairie Pothole region as most of you probably know is high priority. We kind of have the everything you could ask for when it comes to wetland resources. And we have a gradient across the state from east to west, you go to the east and we have way too much water you go to the west and they say that they don't have enough so pretty interesting landscape that we get to work in but these are some of the other areas across the country that Ducks Unlimited operates in. So that's the wetlands ecosystem services that they provide floodwater storage, water quality, groundwater recharge, nutrient capture, wildlife habitat, all of these ecosystems functions that are provided by wetlands. When you take those away bad things start happening downstream and typically what happens is that the public picks up the tab for those problems and the take home message there is that we should be trying to conserve wetland resources to the best of our ability. Wetland mitigation restoration enhancement, creation and or preservation of a project that serves to offset unavoidable wetland impacts required as a condition of a permit of federal state law. Most people aren't doing well in restorations just out of the, the goodness of their own heart there's usually a requirement for jurisdiction to meet no net loss or various regulations that are on the books to conserve wetlands, some of those being swamp buster jurisdictional structures of the US. Some states, I can't remember what presentation it was earlier talking about some states have premises and they actually have stricter regulations over their water resources than the federal government. What we do at the US we focus on large scale offsite wetland restorations we accumulate or we take a cumulative approach to fractional wetland impacts, we pool those funds and we go and we build large offsite wetland mitigation properties. Where, you know, we will take the liability the long term responsibility of offsetting the wetland impacts from various projects in that watershed. Small onsite, typically creation when you see something that more looks like a fish pond in a Walmart parking lot. Those sometimes can pass the smell test but it's usually part of their permitting process to maintain a wetland resource within that footprint of the property that they have a control over. And part of that is because with the wetland mitigation program there's a lot of requirements long term monitoring and things that go with that that can be pretty cumbersome. If you're going to do wetland restoration, you first have to identify impaired wetlands so I'm going to go over some of the main things that we see in North Dakota I won't go so much into the spill of spills that we see in Western North Dakota the remediation that goes on with some of those but a lot of these have to do with land conversion. Surface ditching is probably the most common and really took off in the 1950s in the Prairie Pothole region. This is an area north of Devils Lake North Dakota this water is all going south, eventually into Devils Lake. You can see the pretty elaborate ditching systems that have been put in place and it's interesting that these properties where you do see wetlands intact are either owned by the federal government as waterfall production areas or are under Fish and Wildlife Service wetland and grassland conservation easements so those wetland resources those landowners have been paid not to drain those wetlands moving forward. Filled. You know we see a lot of this around municipalities are putting in new housing developments. Next to farmsteads they tend to get filled in feed lots things like that sediment filled is becoming a bigger issue. A lot of the agricultural lands that we have they've been farmed for somewhere around 100 years and a lot of that sedimentation is getting in those wetlands and slowly filling them in their losing capacity. And a lot of the times with the erosion that we're seeing in some of these systems, riverine systems, riverine corridors. All that sediment drops out in those in those pothole, depressional wetlands that are near these wetland resources. This is kind of what it typically looks like when they're getting filled. We do mitigate for a lot of this work through our program. Pumped. This is a rare occurrence but it does happen there is situations where we find wetlands being pumped it's expensive to annually pump wetlands and just to fight the same fight every single year. Most times there's other solutions that are typically put in place but for short term solutions for landowners a lot of times they will set up pumps and pump wetlands dry. This is a fairly large semi permanent wetland that is Northwestern Cask County. This landowner wanted to convert this land and start cropping this site and that's a wetland that if you ask me if you know how you're going to get rid of it it's a closed basin this is a terminal basin there's no outlet. Looks like a pretty hard sell to try and get rid of that water but that's what it looked like after they install the pump and they pump that for about 10 or 12 years. They're actually still in the process of working with us to try and decommission some of these things but they spent a lot of money and a lot of investment in putting in a large scale pump they moved that water up to the Northwest and out of the property drain tile something that's very common. Iowa Minnesota it's been there for a very long time, but it's moving west at a pretty rapid pace and very expensive to install, but with the price of land these days most producers are seeing the benefit of installing drain tiles a cheaper option to increase productivity on their acres, rather than go out and buy new land. Pattern tile drainage that'll what that's what it looks like when they're done. There'll be an outlet on one corner of this field and send most of that subsurface and surface water downstream. So here you got wetlands you're going to try and generate some lift as I said earlier there's jurisdictions they all credit these things differently depending on the practices that you employ. And the main ones we're going to focus on today restoration enhancement creation and preservation they all have different crediting mechanisms, and you'll see a recurring pattern here as to which one is the best or the one that we think is the most viable option for doing something, although there's scenarios where all of these have their have their day in the sun so. Restoration is returning hydrology to a previously impacted historical wetlands so essentially just turn the water back on just put that water back where it was. We have a lot of data that shows historical seed banks in North Dakota persist even in sites that have been farmed for a very long time. Usually it's a matter of just holding that water back again and your wetlands will restore function over a matter of time. Ditchfugs linear ditch fills and dams earth and construct work is really what we focus on for our restoration projects. They're not fancy they're not glitzy they're not what everybody thinks is big engineered water control projects, but they're resilient and they last a long time and frankly the agencies typically prefer these over some of the other. engineered options that we can do and I think it was the first speaker today that said they may be more attractive they may be new but they're unproven they're more expensive and typically they don't last as long. Issues to watch out for there's some pretty big like golden rules that we deal with that if you're going to waste time on some of these issues usually you're better off just finding a new site to work on but walking out for property boundaries. Working with landowners or restore wetlands isn't what I would call the easiest thing in the world to convince people to put land back take it out of production. Hold water back on their land usually financial compensation is a pretty big part of this equation. You cannot backwater on somebody else and if you have a wetland you know a lot of times we find great suitable wetlands but there's two three four wetland landowners and getting all those landowners to agree. Most of those neighbors don't agree on things on a weekly basis let alone restoring wetlands that are going to impact. All of their property so not all wetlands can be legally stored without neighboring consent flood easements and things like that. Sometimes it's pretty tricky or deal to coordinate all those things. This is an example the wetland. Up here. One ditch that leads into this stream fairly straightforward restoration plan but as you can see the property boundary splits that if ducks and limited were to restore that wetland we there's the drain. We block that off with a ditch plug in a linear ditch fill. You get water across the property line and you'd be in violation of the law unless you had consent to do that so a lot of the times you know we can identify these drain wetlands but I'd say 50% of them are over property boundaries and those conversations typically don't lead anywhere. Fixes for filled wetlands. You're really the only option there is for excavation and it's extremely expensive. So, frankly those usually there's houses built on top of them there they're in neighborhoods where you're not going to be going in and tearing down infrastructure. It's really tough to do anything with filled wetlands now sediment filled wetlands that are in agricultural settings are a different. You do have the potential to restore those but you're still going to be going in bringing out material and increasing capacity in those basins. An issue that you may have is where are you going to spoil all that material if the producer doesn't want it on their farmland or if it's in grasslands you may not have many options for moving that it's extremely expensive to truck it down the road. Pumped pretty inexpensive to restore as you just tear the pump out pull the piping the water comes back and you're done. But as I said earlier these are fairly rare they're kind of a unicorn when it comes to getting restoration acres out of something like that drain tile breaking lines. You're going to have heavy equipment out there you're going to be digging up some of these lines are 10 to 12 feet deep and locating them. Some of these old systems were never mapped so trying to locate which lines to hit you could just draw a line across the field and break every line. But it's going to be a fairly large project and at the end of it you hope you hit them all and you still may have one pipe that is still removing all the all the hydrology out the site. So unless you have a really good map or recently tiled field that has GIS information which if somebody has invested that much money recently they're typically not going to be tearing out their drain tile. And this is an example of one wetland that would be tiled just a shot of how that would go into a county main you could break if you knew exactly where that line was you could dig it up break it. Bentonite clay is used a lot of time to plug these up. But you want to make sure you get them all. Or you spent a lot of money for nothing. Take home message on restoration earthen embankments. A lot of time that's what spoil material that they dug out of those ditches is nearby they haven't moved it and they pile it on one side kind of gets to the compaction talk that we were talking about earlier. A lot of times you can push that back in, dress it, reseed it and you'll be good to go but it's the highest rate of success you know that surface ditches moving water downstream you build a dam you fill the ditch everybody's happy. Your hydric soils will be saturated again your seed base is still within those wetlands and really it's the most bang for your buck. Establishing a baseline in North Dakota we use Army Corps wetland delineations the Great Plains manual it's dependent on hydrology soils and vegetation and we combine that with the NRCS scope and effect determination where we do a linear measure of drainage for surface ditching. Some of these other mechanisms we would have to quantify the drainage by other means but with surface ditching where we have most of our focus we're using these two methods. To determine exactly how much lift that we can generate and part of that is determining exactly what your baseline is what resources are on site before you do your project. How much credit can be received for the program of work. So these are the ratios that are widely accepted for wetland work. There is variations by state throughout our region we have quite a few manuals that we have to abide by by the state jurisdictions but frankly when you come down to all the credits that they use it really comes to a one to one for restoration two to one for enhancement. Two to one for creation 10 to one for preservation so some of these projects you may have a combination of each of these on on any given site. But really your restoration is what you want to focus on creation high risk. You may not have the soils appropriate to get hydrophytic vegetation or hydric soils to gravelly sandy you may have seepage through the bottom of the wetland you may not store any of the water that you think that you're going to we don't want to be in the business of lining anything so you're only getting half credit pretty high risk but there is a time and a place for for each one of these. This is from that same general area from earlier north of Devils Lake, just to show you guys what what what we go through as far as getting a mitigation plan by the approved by the Army Corps of Engineers. Can you guys see that is it too dark. There's the drainage system on the left, although potholes that had been drained and on the right is the crediting scenarios and mitigation plan, which we had approved by the Army Corps of Engineers. The pink in the middle is classified as creation and that's because of our wetland delineation we had problematic soils in that area that were very close to being hydric but did not quite meet the official definition for the core so those were credited as creation at two to one all the red were drained restoration. The blue is preservation 10 to one those were existing wetland resources you can see up here on this map. And enhancement is this little green they call it the egg method that's the yolk and the egg that wetland was not fully drained. It was only partially drained. So you get two to one enhancement for the wetland that was still existing because you brought the original hydrology back to it and then you get one to one for everything on the outside that was fully drained. This is what that site looked like after construction we had not seated it yet. But versus our plan and one year it feels like as soon as you start working in wetlands no matter how dry it is the next spring they're underwater and that's the risk of getting your work done in the year that you would plan because otherwise you can be left with quite the mess to clean up in the spring when everything is wet. This was a fairly large construction job just to do this earth and dirt work I think final bill was somewhere around $300,000 to do just the construction on this and this was 160 acre parcel that was placed under easement with the landowners. What these ditch plugs look like up close they're fairly cheap option a single ditch plug like this in a surface ditch is typically a contractor is out there for the day. $4 or $5,000 to do something like this you can see the wetland in the background. This was in the fall we were working when it was dry but all this water was moving downstream and that's what we had after we were done with our construction. This is in Montreal County. We're doing aerial imagery of you can see these linear features here are pretty indicative you can see the shadows these were very large ditches that had drained these wetlands you can see how flat they look. You can see this in Topo survey. We also use WebSale survey which was spoken about earlier NWI will take LiDAR data available and check out these areas but you can typically see these flat wetland bottoms pretty well. In the left in the left picture they were fully drained and in the right was the spring after construction and you can see that this was actually in native prairie, which is rare to have wetlands drain and native prairie like that that was never converted. But that was what as best as we could tell these were drained somewhere in the 30s and 40s for livestock consolidation during a drought to get that water down to this larger semi permanent wetland to keep drinkable water down there. There was somebody running around Montreal County in the 40s and 50s with some really big equipment because that was one of the ditches and there's a in this typical area there's a lot a lot of drained wetlands that are like this impassure land that are all the same size have the same dimensions and they're all night pre 1957 imagery that that we can find so somebody was putting water on water way back then so I think you could drive to pickups do this this ditch. This is the same site looking north Googler shot prior to us doing a restoration and that's what it was like after we were done. This is another one of our say it's just to show kind of how we do some dams and mixtures of earth and ditch plugs and things like that drainage network this is north of Carrington along highway 281. This is one of the first ones we did back in 2014. On the right you can see kind of where we cut off those ditch systems and impounded water and did some excavation to bring that wetland complex back erosion controls one of the, you know, biggest things that we struggle with. For the most part we use emergency spillways when we have the topography available to us but sometimes we have to run water over the top of the dike and over down the dam. And when that happens, as I said we're holding water back and it seems like it always starts raining as soon as we're done with construction. We like to see our well and fill up but when they start running over we get nervous. So we use erosion control bank blankets even are probably pretty liberal with some of those because going back and fixing these things a year later because once they're vegetated they pretty much take care of themselves but we've had some blow out events where we just had high flows and we've had to go on bare dirt and it just it doesn't end well but pure Matt flex Matt concrete woven blankets textiles seed beneath those if you can get a year where you don't have erosion concerns you're you're pretty much in the clear. The enhancement practice improvement of an existing or impaired wetland sediment removal it's one of those practices partially drained wetlands, adding water to an existing wetland additional hydrology. We typically don't like to just put water on top of existing wetlands for the sake of it, but it is possible to do creation shallow swells with sufficient watershed and hydrology. As I said earlier so it was going to be problematic and their higher risk higher risk of failure, you spend a lot of money on construction. And what happens if three or four years later the regulatory agency that you're doing this for says that it's not sufficient or you didn't meet your performance standards, you're going to have to do something all over again. We've got dams borrow sites construction borrow sites. A lot of times will get deep water habitat that are pretty good at raising fish but not good for shallow water wetland habitat. This is a photo of one of our sites, you can see the water at current elevation that's the natural well and elevation that was delineated we hit groundwater. We got restoration one to one credit for this, but you can see the dozers down here peeling back, and we're actually expanding that wetland and expanding the size of it. And everything outside of this line was credited as creation two to one so to date it is functioning well. These were these areas on the previous plan. We didn't go all the way back but we said that we had borderline soils. We hadn't knew we had a really high likelihood that the wetlands would function there so preservation is placing a restrictive easement on naturally occurring and existing wetland resources that have not been altered. You can see in this image. This is a project but this large wetland in the bottom we only get 10 to one you place an easement on it it's not going anywhere but it doesn't provide much lift or any new additionality. That's that wetland after that project after construction. There's a theme here. Most of our agencies prefer us to use natural infrastructure versus active and I'll speak a little bit more to what I mentioned earlier. I love these dams earth and spillways longer lifespan, more resilient and just less problems overall and they're cheaper. You get into stop log structures, whistle tubes culvert cheap pile weirs. You're going to have higher construction bills. Frankly, in North Dakota where we have water and freezing ground and if they're not installed perfect the shortens the lifespan on them structures rust out. As I said, do you came to North Dakota in 1984 and a lot of our original engineers have just retired in the past five years. And it's kind of interesting because a lot of the projects that they did for BL and in Montana, and some of the stock dams that they built in Western North Dakota back in the 80s are now reaching their lifespan and they're starting to blow out all the structures are starting to rust out and we're going back and redoing them. And even they admit that they could have done it differently at the time and saved everybody around 230 years later. Wetland suitable for restoration correct topography and no boundary issues willing landowners. So I'll restate if you don't if you're going to mess with property boundaries just don't just move on because you're not going to get people to agree you don't want to end up in court later it's not worth the fight. It's not worth it has a wetland on their land that's, that's, that's right for restoration surface ditch, and you're going to be time and money ahead and willing landowners. It's not worth barking up the wrong tree for too long because it's probably not going to lead anywhere. If you get told once maybe try one more time but after that move on. And then these sites is really aerial imagery review and areas that we're interested in working in. We'll also check on auctions and classified ads for sales that are on the market. There's a lot of website resources for that now. But the benefit to that is you already have a landowner who's interested in doing something with their property and you're not just cold calling or soliciting people. It's not a great review. It's fairly easy to see you can throw a dart at a map and find drained wetlands in a township for the most part in North Dakota. And some of those landowners are interested in doing things so smart so to this group and the audience that we're speaking with today company own land is one thing that takes care of a lot of this if you don't have to worry about landowners that's, that's really great to look at the property that you do have access to and see if you can make something work there. Farmland owners off of local land values, obviously that varies widely from east to west. Red River Valley farmland is a lot more valuable than let's say stuff on the state line of Montana. But you deal with some of the fatigue that has come with the development over the last decade out in Western North Dakota and trying to talk about doing anything is sometimes difficult as well. As I said, most of the time you're doing this for a jurisdiction, they're likely gonna require that there's a term on this project, whether it's a five year, 10 year, 30 year deal, they're gonna say that you need to replace wetland resources. Maybe it's just while you're doing work in a certain area, but you typically need an agreement at a minimum. And some of these need to be defensible if you were to challenge them. Otherwise everybody's gonna be upset that nobody's stuck to kind of their obligations. So de-districtions, agreements, they're hard to enforce, but they're better than nothing. Conservation easements, you can get different term conservation easements. We typically do 99 year or we work with the Fish and Wildlife Service on perpetual easements. So a lot of these wetlands that Ducks Unlimited works on won't be ever taken back and put back into production. And largely determined by the goals of your regulatory agency and your obligations. Some of the monitoring and management. So for our wetland mitigation projects, we have a mandatory five year monitoring period where we have to prove that the wetlands are doing what we said they would do in our initial mitigation plan. That can and does go longer depending on how the site is behaving. Site inspections, performance standards, vegetation management, getting that vegetation up to where it needs to be with a acceptable amount of weeds. We do native grass restoration seedings where we do 30 to 40 species. We try and put in as many as much diversity as we can, but that's there's a limiting factor there where you put five more species in and it doubles the cost of the seed mix and it's just not worth it. So we do what we can knowing that a lot of these lands aren't gonna ever be tilled up and receded again. We also have to put a fairly large endowment with each property. They've been running in the six figure neighborhood for required endowments to go with that property to make sure that if there's any catastrophic events or management in the future that there's funds to take corrective actions. To summarize what we've talked about today. So these are some of the big considerations when we were looking at wetland restoration sites not just for mitigation, but in general. Site selection, your due diligence that you're not gonna have issues down the line where you're gonna end up in court. Can you negotiate and acquisition, survey design, engineering? Your permitting is usually ongoing throughout that process. Construction, meeting performance standards, site protection instruments like agreements, conservation easements and long-term management funds. Is there any questions? Yeah. So how do you, for seasonal wetland or semi-permanent wetland or temporary wetland, how do you feel different? Yeah, that's a great question. It's something that's not fully accounted for. They haven't got the regulators don't say, well, you impacted a temporary we're gonna make you replace a temporary. There is a factor of consolidation that goes on with the wetland mitigation industry. So you hope that you have a robust wetland complex that you can work in like some of these properties we did have semi-permanence on them. We had temporary seasonals. But as the exchange goes you're not always gonna get a temporary for a temporary. If you're doing out-of-kind mitigation let's say you're impacting a stream for a road project what the core is doing right now in North Dakota is they're making you do because there isn't stream mitigation projects we don't have a lot of blue ribbon stream trout streams in North Dakota. So rehabbing streams is kind of an unknown thing and not unknown but something that nobody has jumped on completely. And if you're doing stream work you're gonna get hit and you're mitigating with wetlands you're gonna hit with a two to one ratio. So they imply ratios as well if you're going too much out-of-kind or too far away from the impact site.