The Arkansas Department of Transportation (ArDOT) is federally mandated to comply with several environmental regulations prior to the construction of any highway project. In this presentation, I will mainly discuss Section 404 of the Clean Water Act, and, specifically, I will explain Compensatory Mitigation for Losses of Aquatic Resources and the Final Mitigation Rule. I believe that this topic is relatively unknown by ArDOT owns approximately 6,000 acres of mitigation properties across the state. We will discuss how the sites are selected, restored, monitored, and maintained. Also, as we discuss potential restoration techniques, I will have information and pictures on some late summer/fall wildflowers that can be found in and around the Buffalo National River!

Kayti is a botanist with the Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department’s Environmental Division. At AHTD, she oversees the Department’s several Wildflower Programs, consults with USFWS regarding endangered and threatened species (namely plants), and performs wetland and stream impact assessments in order to obtain the proper 404 permit. She was born and raised in Harrison, Arkansas. She has a B.S. in Botany and an M.A. in Geography, both from the University of Oklahoma. For her thesis, she developed a Floristic Quality Assessment (FQA) for Oklahoma wetlands. An FQA is tool used to evaluate and determine the quality (or degree of pristineness) of wetland habitats based on the vegetation present at a site.