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Compensatory mitigation, or biodiversity offsets, provide a mechanism for maintaining or enhancing environmental values in situations where development is being planned, despite detrimental environmental impacts. Offsets are generally intended as an option for addressing any remaining environmental impacts of a development plan, after efforts have been made to avoid,.minimize, or restore on-site impacts. Although offset programs require that developers adhere to the mitigation hierarchy to avoid, minimize, and restore biodiversity on-site before considering an offset for residual impacts, no quantitative guidelines exist for this decision-making process. What criteria are needed to require that impacts be minimized or avoided altogether? Here, we examine how conservation planning can provide a way to address this issue. By blending landscape-level conservation planning with application of the mitigation hierarchy, we can ensure that the use of biodiversity offsets is consistent with sustainable development practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the quantitative syntheses' communicating outcomes to decision makers in environmental and ecological science.

In this article, the authors discusses the importance of place-based research in the study of ecological systems as done in the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) and the U.S. Forest Service's Experimental Forest and Rangeland sites. It states that the researchers have developed community partnerships to increase the relevance of ecological research to environmental decision making processes. It mentions that the research uses socially and ecologically viable plans to conduct research.