From assessment, planning, and permitting, through construction, EA collaborates with the client to comply with various regulatory requirements to facilitate a strategic and balanced outcome. Utilizing a lifetime of learning, we seek to minimize project risk by anticipating pitfalls and developing solutions before challenges present themselves. We believe that an inclusive partnership with the people we serve, as well as proactive engagement with regulators, is essential to avoiding challenges on the way to a successful project conclusion. Experience to generate foresight that allows for active collaboration to develop innovative and effective solutions are the elements that set EA’s terrestrial services apart.
EA’s success starts with our ecologists tapping vast experience with surveying for and developing management plans to control nuisance and non-native flora and fauna. That experience ranges broadly from the western Pacific/eastern Philippine tropics to the West Indies and throughout the United States. Our management plans are successful because they are developed in compliance with all applicable legal mandates and directives.
Another example of success are the detailed digital habitat/vegetation/land use maps and geographic information system databases EA develops in cooperation with the U.S. Geological Survey, Rocky Mountain Mapping Center, and other federal, regional, state, and non-government organizations. Our digital products are based on a vegetation classification of plant associations and land use mapping units. Vegetation classification is based on field data collection and analysis per the National Vegetation Classification System and Natural Area Inventory protocols, using standards adopted by the Federal Geographic Data Committee. Our map production relies on a combination of standard aerial photointerpretation and satellite image processing and is transferred to a digital orthophoto using an ArcInfo environment. The final vegetation map is assessed for accuracy, to achieve a minimum of 80 percent accuracy both for the entire map and individual mapping units. Federal Geographic Data Committee-compliant metadata are required for all geographic information system map products and are part of the electronic database.
