Federal Highway Administration Research and Technology Evaluation Final Report: Eco-Logical

Appendix F. 2016 Evaluation Interview Guide

This appendix lists the questions verbatim the evaluation team asked 2007–2013 Eco-Logical Grant Program funding recipients. Questions include the following:

1. Has your agency completed any ongoing activities related to the Eco-Logical approach or grant/award since the project period ended?
2. How has FHWA enabled your agency to adopt the Eco-Logical approach?
   • Would you have done this project anyway? If you would have done this project anyway, how has it been different because of the Eco-Logical grant/award?
3. How is your agency incorporating the Eco-Logical approach into its business practices?
   • Increases in partnering?
   • Sharing data and integrating plans?
   • Creating Regional Ecosystem Framework (GIS map layers)?
   • Analyzing effects on conservation objectives?
   • Establishing and prioritizing sites for potential development and broad scale mitigation?
   • Developing a crediting strategy (mitigation goals and measures for mitigation banks, programmatic permitting, and other mitigation tools)
   • Developing programmatic agreements and consultations?
   • Implementing agreements, incorporating planning information into project development, and tracking commitments?
   • Updating Regional Ecosystem Framework and ecological data?
4. How has the Eco-Logical Program and approach contributed to improved project delivery processes?
   • Reduced project delivery times?
   • Cost savings?
   • More effective collaboration and better relationships?
   • Improved transparency?
5. How has the Eco-Logical Program and approach contributed to improved environmental mitigation?
   • Do you have anecdotal or quantitative evidence of this? (e.g., avoids/minimizes impacts in planning or compensates for impacts through broad scale mitigation approaches)
   • What ideas do you have for how users of Eco-Logical could start to track and quantify environmental benefits or minimized impacts?
6. Eco-Logical Steps Completed—please review and confirm accuracy. See Q.2 for a description of each of the nine eco-logical steps. More information can also be found here.

   Recipient	Step 1: Collaboration	Step 2: Eco Status	Step 3: Develop REF	Step 4: Assess REF	Step 5: Prioritize	Step 6: Crediting	Step 7: Agreements	Step 8: Implement	Step 9: Update REF

7. Are there any other general benefits or challenges you would like to share that were not covered in the previous questions?

Table 14 below notes which types of agencies were interviewed for the 2016 evaluation of Eco-Logical, the specific agency, and the interviewee category attributed to their specific responses.