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A TRADABLE CREDIT APPROACH Objectives 1) To create positive incentives for all landowners to participate in the recovery of the RCW by rehabilitating abandoned colonies on their land and restoring such colonies to active status; 2) To establish objective and readily ascertainable conservation targets for the recovery of the RCW Sandhills population; 3) To treat governmental and non-governmental landowners evenhandedly with respect to the conservation responsibilities they bear; 4) To provide reasonable certainty with respect to the obligations of landowners having RCWs on their lands; and 5) To provide a model that might be replicable for other RCW populations elsewhere. Key Assumptions 1) That all active and abandoned RCW colonies in the Sandhills popula- tion are known or can, with reasonable effort, be identified and monitored; 2) That it is possible to rehabilitate abandoned RCW colonies so that they become active; 3) That there exists some minimum number of active colonies that must be maintained in order to have a viable RCW Sandhills population (e.g., 350?); 4) That an active colony or group of colonies located more than some specified distance from the nearest active colony not part of the same group is effectively isolated from, and not part of, the same population as the colonies in the latter group; and 5) That a priority in abandoned colony rehabilitation is to rehabilitate those colonies that would reduce the fragmentation of the RCW Sandhills population by linking major subpopulations with currently isolated minor subpopulations. How It Works In Practice The basic idea is to condition any authorized "taking" of active colonies within the Sandhills population upon successful prior mitigation by means of rehabilitat- ing abandoned colonies in that same population. Two for one mitigation (i.e., two 20