standard sustainable design practices

To substantiate this as an eligible ID credit strategy, it will be the responsibility of the project team to hang some metrics on this and show a "significant" improvement. While this sounds potentially insurmountable, you are lucky here in that LEED has deemed "biodiversity" as one of the 7 Impact Categories from LEED v4, so while the hard scientist in me would prefer that these benefits be quantified in more concrete units of measure (like tons of carbon dioxide), it is likely that a simple increase in the number of established species could alone warrant a quantification, as LEED appears to accept an increase in biodiversity as inherently good without qualification. To contrast this with "standard design", you will essentially define (and justify) the baseline, and if you quantify this based on # of established species (or similar), you can simply show that the design case is significantly improved over your self-defined standard design. Now you just need a really good narrative, and an open minded cert reviewer. Good Luck!