The purpose of the overall project, lead by Thomas Crisman in the Department of Integrative Biology, is to work with various stakeholder organizations, primarily local and state government agencies, to explore the concept of using compensatory mitigation in freshwater wetlands to further the overall habitat restoration and protection goals in the Tampa Bay watershed. The overall goals are to develop a framework for including compensatory mitigation in a meaningful way within habitat restoration goals, and to develop appropriate mechanisms to integrate this concept into local and state government plans. The role of the FCCDR is to develop a geospatial dataset of historic wetland boundaries and conduct a change analysis to examine the structural and functional changes that have occurred during urbanization of the Tampa Bay watershed. The following are CO-PI affiliated with this project: Dr. Shawn Landry, Dr. Tomas Crisman, Dr. Susan Bell, Dr. Mark Rains, and Dr. Mark Stewart.