The Animas River Wetlands mitigation bank is classified as a general mitigation bank open to the public for projects that require offsite mitigation. 

Animas River Wetlands will establish and maintain aquatic habitats and upland buffers until it is demonstrated to the satisfaction of the agencies represented on the Interagency Review Team (IRT) that the wetlands are healthy and functioning.

Patti Zink
patti@animasriverwetlands.com
4166 County Road 203
Durango, Colorado 81301
970-759-5585

Animas River Wetlands will provide a diversity of habitat types which will increase the functions and values of the site as a whole including open water, emergent marsh, wet meadow, willow stands and cottonwood galleries.  Diversity of wetland habitat types creates synergistic effects that result in the proper functioning ecological systems within the wetland complex and the Animas River floodplain as a whole.

Creating diverse habitat niches will ensure a diverse plant community within the targeted wetland zones, and will provide greater opportunities for utilization by various wildlife species.  Habitat diversity will increase and expand the multiplicity and productivity of invertebrate food webs, thereby expanding the vertebrate food webs.  In addition, the wetland bank will provide ecological functions including: flood abatement and surface water storage, nutrient cycling and retention of elements, and increase wetland interspersion along the Animas River. 

Wetlands can be found in every country and every climatic zone in the United States and around the world.

Use of a mitigation bank to compensate for the lose of wetlands can be preferable to on-site mitigation because it will:

• Reduce Agency time spent reviewing and processing permit applications;
• Decrease the temporal loss of wetland habitat
• Eliminate the Permit tee’s need to dedicate or acquire land and water rights for mitigation purposes;
• Eliminate the Permit tee’s responsibility to design, construct, monitor and maintain mitigation sites.

Furthermore, in most cases, even when on-site mitigation efforts are commenced at the earliest stage of project construction, there is some temporal loss of wetland function and value.  In cases where the mitigation will take the form of restoration at the completion of project construction, the temporal loss may be several months, or even years.  When the mitigation is accomplished through the purchase of wetland mitigation credits from an off-site Bank, the mitigation is in place before the project commences and temporal loss is greatly reduced or eliminated all together.

For information about purchasing credits:

Patti Zink
patti@animasriverwetlands.com
4166 County Road 203
Durango, Colorado 81301
970-759-5585.