Applied Ecological Services, Inc.
Wisconsin Office
17921 Smith Road,
P. O. Box 256
Brodhead, WI 53520
Phone: 608.897.8641
Voicemail: 608.897.4898
AES Fax: 608.897.8486
TCRN Fax: 608.897.2044
Info@AppliedEco.com

Illinois Office
120 West Main St
W. Dundee, IL 60118
Phone: 847.844.9385
Fax: 847.844.8759

Kansas City Office
1904 Elm Street
Eudora, KS 66025
Phone 785.542.3090
Fax 785.542.3570

Minnesota Office
21938 Mushtown Rd
Prior Lake, MN 55372
Phone: 952.447.1919
Fax: 952.447.1920

East Coast Office
1100 E. Hector Street Suite #398
Conshohocken, PA 19428
Phone: 610.238.9088

Conservation Development: Concept vs. Reality

Ask a developer, a municipal officer, a land planner and an ecologist to define "Conservation Development" and you're likely to get four very different answers. That's because, as a concept for developing residential or commercial properties, Conservation Development is relatively new.

But it is rapidly gaining popularity among those who refer to conventional subdivisions as "cookie cutter," and among those who recognize that desires for living space amenities are shifting in the American culture. The Wall Street Journal recently cited a national study of home buyers who ranked "Natural open space," "Walking and bike paths" and "Gardens with native plants" as their top three wishes. Golf courses came in a distant tenth.

So what is Conservation Development? Here's the ecological viewpoint...

According to AES founder and ecologist Steven Apfelbaum, true Conservation Development can be defined as considering the needs of the land first and foremost, and then making developed areas complementary to those needs.

"A lot of consultants and corporations think they are doing `Conservation Development' when they aren't necessarily," explained Apfelbaum. "To date, the primary method has been setting aside the woodlands, wetlands and stream courses and developing around them. What's missing from that picture is an understanding of how developing around those resources impacts them. Unless great care is taken to buffer and manage the resources, they will decline."

Of course, the ecological perspective is only one piece of the Conservation Development puzzle. Obviously, every development must be successful financially, it must follow local development ordinances and it must be acceptable within the local culture.

"At AES, we try to approach these projects from a balanced foundation of ecology, economy and culture, bringing these things together in a way that makes sense from each approach," said Apfelbaum.

One of the most heralded models of Conservation Development in the U.S. has been the 677-acre Prairie Crossing project in Grayslake, Illinois. There, 319 homes are being built on 132 acres of land while 463 acres are reserved for prairie, wetland and sustainable organic farming.

As the ecological firm on the project team, AES developed the Stormwater Treatment Train concept that uses prairie swales, upland prairies and wetlands to reduce volume and increase the quality of rainwater before it reaches Lake Mascouten and outlets downstream to a high quality natural marsh. In fact, the water in Lake Mascouten is of such high quality that it has been established as the first threatened and endangered fish refuge in the state.

But reduced runoff and improved stormwater quality are only a couple of the benefits of Conservation Development at Prairie Crossing and elsewhere. Other benefits include improved wildlife habitat, increased biodiversity, enhanced aesthetic and open space amenities, lower development costs and enhanced marketability of the development.

Changed thinking: The Germantown project

With pioneering models such as Prairie Crossing to study, developers and environmental professionals are starting to cooperate to change the way projects are being developed. To encourage this partnership and new way of thinking, The Conservation Fund and the Great Lakes Watershed Protection Agency recently selected a proposed residential development in Germantown, Wisconsin as one of three national model project sites.

On the project, we teamed with Bielinski Development, Inc. the largest single-family developer in the Milwaukee area and other firms to plan and implement the cutting-edge residential development.

"Fragmenting property into large lots clustered around natural resources like wetlands, and building large, executive-style homes is not a model approach to making conservation subdivisions accessible to a larger percentage of the population. We want to be a big part of changing the way development is done in the Milwaukee area," said Bob Brownell of Bielinski Development.

Bielinski also has taken the Conservation Development concept a step further, retaining AES to conduct natural resource inventories on more than a dozen potential development sites in southeastern Wisconsin. Where feasible, planning on these sites will preserve existing high quality natural areas and restore additional areas as native vegetation buffers.

Early planning protects communities from urban sprawl

Applying the Conservation Development concept on a very broad scale, three suburban communities have recently taken the proactive step of identifying high quality natural areas, even before anticipated development pressures threaten to impose "urban sprawl" in their localities.

Lino Lakes, Minnesota
We have partnered with Brauer & Associates, a Minneapolis landscape architecture firm, to map the natural features within the entire 36-square miles of the city of Lino Lakes, Minnesota. There, the Brauer/AES team was brought in not only to map the resources, but also to identify ways to protect them using conservation design principles.

"In an open design charette with developers, townspeople and the mayor of Lino Lakes, we redesigned a conventional residential development plan right before their eyes, using the same number of lots and actually increasing the number of homes by adding a few multi-family structures," described Apfelbaum. "And in our plan, 40 to 50 percent of the land was retained as open spaces in prairies and wetlands."

Liberty, Missouri
On the outskirts of Kansas City, the suburban city of Liberty, Missouri retained AES and Land Planning Services (LPS) of St. Charles, Illinois, as a team to conduct a similar large-scale natural resources inventory, vegetation cover map and design charette. Located square in the path of future urban sprawl, Liberty hopes to preserve and restore its natural heritage using Conservation Development and Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND) concepts.

Woodstock, Illinois
And in Illinois, the city of Woodstock has also contracted with the LPS/AES team to conduct a natural resource inventory and TND design charette. While this project is still in its infancy, we expect the Woodstock project to become a showcase for how ecologically-sensitive and new urbanist techniques can be applied with quality-of-life benefits for all.

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