Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Conservation agreements try to head off endangered species listings

...Spring also heralds another local rite: In meeting rooms, public-lands ranchers, wildlife biologists, mountain bikers and government officials gather to discuss how to help the Gunnison grouse. The working group is close to committing to a voluntary plan with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the Gunnison grouse and its public-land habitat. Candidate conservation agreements, as these plans are called, are often intended to keep a species from being listed. But land managers aren't assuming this last-minute agreement will keep the grouse off the roster. Instead, stakeholders hope that the recovery measures will be good enough so that, even if the grouse is listed, restrictions placed on land use will be less severe. With reams of other listing decisions now looming, participation in candidate agreements is growing in the West. More than 1,000 plants and animals are slated for decisions by 2018 under settlement agreements between Fish and Wildlife and two environmental groups. The Gunnison grouse's conservation agreement will cover 397,000 acres of public lands, two-thirds of the bird's occupied habitat. It will keep recreation and ranching away from leks during key periods, and also monitor the impacts of roads, trails and grazing. Land managers have previously evaluated such disturbances separately; now, says Samantha Staley, project manager with the Bureau of Land Management's Gunnison field office, officials will be able to account for the cumulative effects.The agreement complements efforts on private property, where some landowners have signed on to protect the Gunnison grouse through a similar tool, called "candidate conservation agreements with assurances." Through those pacts, ranchers, farmers and developers manage their lands to help candidate species -- with the guarantee that they won't face additional regulations if populations decline despite their efforts, or if the species is listed as threatened or endangered...more

1 comment:

Floyd Rathbun said...

Conservation agreements with assurances have been promoted in Nevada for at about ten years. I recently asked a Fish and Wildlife Service biologists how many of these conservation agreements (with assurances) have been signed in Nevada. She knew of two.

The same biologists and her companions complained that the various Indian Tribes were not coming to their sage grouse meetings. I suggested that the ancestors of todays Tribal members went to government meetings 150 years ago and entered into treaties. We can all see how that worked out. Now the same government wants the current residents of the same areas to sign contracts called conservation agreements with assurances. It is really hard to see any difference between the Nineteenth Century Treaties and the Twenty-first Century conservation agreements. It looks like another example of doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result.