Bio

Mr. Babbit is a principal of ecological services who has spent over 25 years assessing and restoring degraded aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems throughout the Southeast. He served for over five years as the East Tennessee Project Manager for Tennessee’s In-Lieu Fee program for stream mitigation. He successfully led teams of professionals, providing design guidance, quality assurance/quality control, marketing and financial management for a variety of ecosystem restoration and watershed planning projects. Through his research related to stream restoration, Mr. Babbit developed hydraulic geometry relationships for streams draining the Southwestern Appalachians in Tennessee and has led workshops teaching stream restoration site assessment. He has extensive experience preparing permit applications for §404/401 of the Clean Water Act, including both Nationwide and Individual permits, Section 26a of the TVA Act, conducting Section 7 of ESA formal and informal consultation with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, preparing NEPA documents, and coordinating Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. He has completed numerous ecological surveys, wetland delineations, wetland and stream restoration designs, watershed assessments, protected species surveys, compensatory mitigation, and associated technical reports.

In previous roles, he was responsible for identifying, developing, permitting, and supervising the design, construction, and monitoring of stream and wetland mitigation projects, including the implementation of more than 25 miles of stream mitigation in Tennessee. He was responsible for all aspects of running an environmental consulting business, including collection and analyses of data sets related to hydrology, ecology, geomorphology, forest metrics, wetland and stream assessments and delineations, stream and wetland restoration, project management, construction oversight, and monitoring. Mr. Babbit has successfully completed some of the largest and most complex stream restoration projects in the southeast in a variety of settings, including the establishment of the first stream mitigation bank in Tennessee.