Firm Profile

Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc, an environmental consultancy, offers services in permitting, watersheds, streams, and rivers. Clients rely on Applied Ecosystem Services for advice, guidance, and technical expertise on a wide range of business and regulatory matters that relate to the natural resource and energy industries.

The firm is strategically located in the Portland, Oregon area which facilitates travel to clients in all states and internationally. It is active in regulatory, legislative, and judicial matters where its technical expertise and clear, effective communications of complex scientific issues to non-technical decision-makers is valued. The firm traces its roots back to 1993 and teams with other technical experts as required for each specific project. The firm works for a fixed fee for all projects where explicit bounds can be identified, and unconditionally guarantees all of its work to be technically sound and legally defensible. Applied Ecosystem Service's record of results for its clients makes it a valued and influential environmental consulting firm.

In the broad category of environmental permitting Applied Ecosystem Services focuses on compliance with NEPA, CWA, ESA, the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1898, and state equivalents. The company successfully permitted more than a dozen commercial sand and gravel dredging operations in the Columbia and Willamette Rivers after the ESA listing of a large number of anadromous salmonid populations by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). The firm received a testimonial letter from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife for the reclamation plan the company prepared on behalf of a hard-rock quarry client. The letter stresses that the firm met both client and agency needs and paved the way for clear and effective communications between them in the future.

Environmental impact assessments of proposed industrial projects are almost always controversial when they involve projects on federally-managed or state-owned lands. Statutory and regulatory language is highly subjective and, therefore, difficult for regulators to make objective decisions and defend them as not arbitrary and capricious. Applied Ecosystem Services developed a mathematically robust model to quantify subjectivity in environmental assessments and provide decision-makers with objective criteria for objective comparison of each alternative and the existing environments. This model is fully compliant with NEPA, CEQ regulations, and agency guidelines and requirements which fulfills the judicial criterion that the agency took a "hard look" at environmental consequences of project approval. The model is easily modified to accommodate requirements in other countries.

The firm is a recognized authority on the integration of physical (landscapes, hydrology, hydraulics, fluvial geomorphology), chemical (organic and inorganic), and biological (algae, plants, macroinvertebrates, fish) components of watersheds, streams, and rivers to explain ecological interactions. Both private sector clients (companies, trade associations, lobbyists, attorneys and litigators) and governments gain better understanding of the current environments and how they might change if commercial and industrial development is approved within those drainage basins.

Firm professionals work together to combine individual technical expertise with specialized knowledge of natural resource and energy business and technology.

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