| Summary: | Mestrado em Ecologia Aplicada Biodiversity offsets, a relatively recent branch of impacts mitigation, have been gaining prominence and importance in several contexts of environmental conservation, including Environmental Impact Assessment procedures. Following the mitigation hierarchy, offset programs aim to compensate residual impacts to the point where their negative effects are neutralized ('no net loss') or supplanted ('net gains'). In this work, is described and evaluated an offset programme directed to benefit two pairs of Golden eagle, which home ranges are close or intersected by the construction of a Very-high Voltage Power Line in northeast of Portugal, due to potential losses related with the infrastructure. Attending to the type of infrastructure, the expectable impacts result from collision with the power line. The programme consisted of habitat management for an important prey species, the European Wild Rabbit, in areas strategically located in order to simultaneously improve the quality of hunting habitats and reduce the probability of collision with the power line. Through various monitoring programs it was possible to assess the effect of the measures both at target species and prey species level, as well as the occurrence of losses associated with the power line. The assessment of losses and gains was conducted in a comprehensive way, being possible to demonstrate the adequancy of the programme and that biodiversity gains obtained supplanted losses, resulting in a net gain of biodiversity. Finally, some considerations are made about the results obtained and some guidelines are defined, to consider in future offset programmes. A compensação ambiental, ramo relativamente recente da mitigação de impactes, tem vindo a ganhar destaque e importância em diversos contextos de conservação ambiental, incluindo os processos de Avaliação de Impactes Ambientais. Seguindo a lógica da hierarquia de mitigação, os programas de compensação ambiental têm por objetivo a compensação dos impactes residuais até ...
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