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Adaptive Reuse and Natural Alternatives
ANA Advisors is an environmental consulting firm that focuses on providing sustainable solutions to complex issues of resource management. Committed to the preservation of the natural environment, our principals & associates create landscape designs that emphasize natural alternatives over conventional development practices and adaptive re-use over demolition or replacement.
What we do:
Drawing on the talents of a diverse group of environmental professionals, our team brings together planners, designers, engineers, and financing specialists to develop site-specific responses to each of the challenges community stakeholders face. A full-service consultancy dedicated to advancing the State of California’s sustainability goals, ANA offers design and improvement assistance to both public and private sector clients, including Non-profits, NGO’s, County & Municipal Planning boards, environmental & open space agencies, individual landowners, and market-rate development companies. Working in concert with local government authorities, ANA offers professional services in three key areas:
I. Park & Open Space Design
II. Habitat Restoration & Preservation
III. Green Infrastructure
I. PARK & OPEN SPACE DESIGN
In the development of parks and open spaces, we work with our clients to address a myriad of competing needs and priorities and to eliminate the obstacles that inhibit the creation of authentic public gathering places.
A site’s development often entails coordination with partners from a long list of public agencies, organizations, and interest groups. The cross-disciplinary team at ANA is highly experienced at working with these groups in the improvement of both active and passive public ‘commons’ spaces as well as in establishing the financial structures necessary to ensure their ongoing success.
Environmental Stewardship
With environmental stewardship as the group’s core principle, ANA’s focus is on serving as an agent for positive social change by facilitating stakeholders’ efforts to improve a community’s quality of life. The strategies we develop to achieve this goal address important economic challenges and collectively aim to enhance a city’s resilience, diversity, and equity
By leveraging its team members’ knowledge and expertise, ANA has the ability to design solutions that meet the growing demands of global climate trends head-on. Among the most important aspects of the team’s mission in this regard are to
Safeguard clean water & healthy landscapes as well as create secure living environments for native plants and animals
Protect and sustain natural spaces for public and private use and preserve them for future generations
Engage with landowners, conservation groups and environmental trusts to forge public policies that will ensure the protection of critical landscape corridors, watersheds, wildlife migration routes, and endangered habitats
Identify self-sustaining funding sources for the creation and maintenance of parklands & open space
Design and develop trail systems that provide recreational benefits to residents and infrastructural connectivity to vital community assets
Design and construct AVA access and environmentally sensitive site circulation plans
II. HABITAT RESTORATION/PRESERVATION
ANA Advisors’ innovative approach to habitat restoration spans all aspects of the intervention process, including initial design, site planning, installation, maintenance, and monitoring. Employing a holistic, client-centered philosophy, our team oversees each phase of a project’s restoration to ensure the long-term health of the natural environment.
Drawing on their extensive relationships with industry experts, ANA’s advisors work closely with state and federal agencies in preparing habitat management plans and in identifying preservation requirements on behalf of private land trusts and public park jurisdictions. We also document the achievement of field success criteria imposed by governmental agencies as Conditions of Approval as well as prepare CEQA/NEPA documents for open space and habitat conservation master plans.
Finally, our team carefully coordinates with land managers and agency staff to develop effective preservation practices and to monitor the continued viability of a site’s natural resources.
III. GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE
By utilizing green infrastructure, ANA’s team creates site management systems that restore natural habitats, revitalize threatened ecosystems and protect the beauty of the natural environment. Green infrastructure strategies emphasize a landscape-based approach to flood control designed to slow rain runoff by promoting accelerated evaporation while filtering out pollutants through the imposition of physical, chemical, and biological barriers. This objective is achieved by employing natural drainage technologies such as bioretention cells, green streetscapes, vegetated berms & swales, and permeable pavement surfaces. While improving stormwater quality, these technologies also aid in reducing the quantity of run-off from a hillside property by detaining and diverting water away from existing facilities and increasing its absorption onsite – a practice known as Combined Sewer Overflow Management or CSO. Because of its team’s use of native plants and landscaped channels as a filtering device, ANA creates infrastructure plans that not only preserve natural habitats but enhance the plant, animal and human communities that they are designed to protect. This side benefit is vital to public health because contaminated runoff caused by agriculture, transportation and development is the biggest contributor to water pollution in most communities. Better watershed planning helps to control toxic discharge by identifying the different kinds of contamination present in stormwater runoff and then devising ways to reduce or contain them at their source. Through proper engineering, the quality of surface, ground and drinking water can be significantly enhanced.