The Park Creek Station Wetland Mitigation Bank preserves, restores and enhances wetlands for the purpose of providing compensatory mitigation credits in advance of unavoidable impacts to wetlands or other aquatic resources.
The 200-acre mitigation bank site in Colorado was selected because there is excellent and unique potential to improve wetland, riparian and stream functions on the site that has significant natural, cultural and open space values. This type of site helps consolidate small, fragmented wetland compensation projects into large contiguous preserves, which have much higher wetland values.
Located where Park Creek punches through the Park Creek Hogback, the site has excellent restoration potential of wetland, riparian and stream resources of the type that are increasingly scarce along the northern Front Range, where most streams of this sort no longer have their natural flows or follow their natural stream course. Park Creek Station Wetland Mitigation Bank is on track to be approved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the fall of 2020.
The establishment of Park Creek Station Wetland Mitigation Bank is expected to result in:
- 1.25 miles of restoration along Park Creek.
- Wetland restoration and establishment.
- Riparian restoration and establishment.
- Additional high-quality buffers.
- Sitewide natural resource management program.
- Substantial functional uplift to the Park Creek system.
- Restoration and conservation of landscape-level wetland diversity, including functional uplift of multiple hydrogeomorphic and vegetation community types.
- Excellent habitat interspersion functions and reference-standard buffer conditions.
- Potential refugia for sensitive and listed species.
- Increased habitat potential for state- and federally listed species.
- Restoration and management of multiple levels of biological diversity.
