This Tool is Changing How We Protect our Wetlands, here’s how you can help
Get Involved in our Development
In the spring of 2024, EPIC and Atlas Public Policy developed the Wetlands Impact Tracker to assist watershed advocates in identifying proposed impacts to wetlands and waterways. Utilizing publicly available data, we developed an AI-assisted workflow to scrape, standardize, and reveal 404 permit notices stored as PDFs. Issued by the Army Corps of Engineers, the 404 individual permit covers projects with significant impacts to Waters of the United States - requiring public review. The Tracker allows users to identify project permit notices by type, impact size, and other metrics across the Gulf of Mexico. Building off this initial development, Atlas and EPIC are expanding the Tracker this year to cover more districts and additional data.
Screenshot of current Tracker tool
Our roadmap includes:
Expansion beyond the Gulf of Mexico to include Mid-Atlantic, Pacific, and Great Lake regions
Inclusion of finalized permits to display alongside notice data when available
Scraping Migration to Army Corp’s new Regulatory Request System
Improved AI data extraction methods and additional data fields
Dashboard usability improvements
What did we learn the first time?
During and subsequent development, EPIC and Atlas cataloged feedback from a diverse set of users to inform future iterations of the tool. Along the way, we learned how different Corps districts and divisions produce and manage data, Corps HQ’s plans for data system modernization, and how advocates and researchers use permit data. These insights have shaped our development roadmap and will inform an improved user experience through better data collection and display.
What’s happened since then?
In July 2024, the Corps began a rollout of the Regulatory Request System (RRS), a centralized web-based platform for permit applicants and the Corps to track, manage, and process permits. Moving to a more modernized system enabled the Corps to provide a new national level interface for public notices, including a map and the ability to directly submit a comment; prior, districts listed notices on their own web pages. It’s a significant improvement to data accessibility and transparency on the part of the Corps; however, notice content like impact acreage is still nested within the permit PDF, requiring data extraction to surface the data for users.
Army Corps of Engineers New Regulatory Request System Public Notice Page
Since development in Spring of 2024, significant advancements to off-the-shelf models like ChatGPT-4o and AI-powered PDF tools have increased data gathering opportunities. Updates for the Tracker will include the latest developments in AI, gleaning more data from the notice PDFs, and improving data quality and quantity with expansion to more districts. In addition, we aim to add data from a Freedom of Information Act request EPIC completed last year containing finalized 404 permit data from 2016 - 2023. This data touchpoint in the permitting process will help to shape the complete picture from project proposal through development and impacts.
On January 20th 2025, the newly sworn-in Trump administration declared a National Energy Emergency, calling for the Army Corps to utilize “emergency… permitting provisions” and expedite petrochemical, energy transmission, and mining developments. Soon after, advocates from the Environmental Integrity Project identified nearly 900 individual and national permit projects (which unlike individual permits, are deemed to have “minimal adverse impacts” and don’t require a notice) under the ‘Emergency’ tab in the Army Corps ORM map. Emergency declarations are typically reserved for natural disaster responses like hurricanes and flooding to quickly address affected infrastructure - not promote domestic energy production. A New York Times article, Trump Administration Moves to Fast-Track Hundreds of Fossil Fuel Projects, was published highlighting the situation, and within days, the filter option was removed for all projects, and national permits removed entirely. For the Wetlands Impact Tracker and Corps data users, there is now an additional value-added benefit for data preservation in scraping notices - maintaining a mirror to the Corps system in the event notices are altered or withdrawn.
Get Involved!
With recent advancements in AI and developments from the Corp, Atlas, and EPIC are excited to expand the capacities of the Tracker to better serve watershed conservation efforts. However, we can’t do it alone! If you’re a user of Corp data, interested in the permitting process, or just generally have ideas on how to improve the Tracker, we’d love to hear from you! We’ll have three opportunities for engagement from late May to August.