PA Aquatic Resource Restoration Conference 2026: Past, Present and Future

The Robinson Fork Mitigation bank project (Phase 1) broke all the traditional project approval and restoration design approaches in Pennsylvania. This project proposal’s timing occurred during the broadening of the collective understanding of natural unaltered conditions, historic alterations and advancing restoration design approaches that fostered innovative and collaborative work beyond norms for the time. This enabled envisioning how large watershed scale restoration projects are conceived, designed, approved, and constructed in PA.

This large 500-acre watershed scale mitigation bank is intended to reestablish, rehabilitate, enhance, and preserve self-sustaining functional stream, wetland, and floodplain valleys. Across the Project, approximately 95,949 linear feet of streams and 46.83 acres of wetlands were reestablished, rehabilitated, or enhanced. The session will explore how this project went from a preliminary proposal in the Spring of 2014 to a fully constructed project in 2017 and how this was accomplished through innovations made in the permit application and plan approval process; degradation/alterations prototype design approach; post restoration monitoring performance and research; and mitigation crediting.