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FWS pursues landmark habitat plan for Califonia salamander
Natalie M. Henry, Greenwire 8/03/05
Photo by William Flaxington
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The Fish and Wildlife Service is hoping that a first-of-its-kind conservation strategy will eliminate the need to designate critical habitat for the Sonoma County population of California tiger salamanders.
Yesterday the agency proposed to designate 74,000 acres of private land in the county as critical habitat for the diminutive native amphibian, essentially the entire range of the species. But FWS is involved in negotiations with the county, landowners, ranchers, citizens, environmentalists and others to develop a conservation strategy that will eliminate the need for critical habitat and instead produce something akin to a habitat conservation plan. HCPs are voluntary habitat protection agreements between private landowners and the federal government.
"We want that local conservation strategy to go into effect. We think that's better [than critical habitat]," said FWS spokesman Al Donner. "It could be an important landmark if we were to see it get through. It's really locally driven, but the agencies are heavily involved too. In some ways it's even more collaborative than an HCP," Donner said, since it involves not just landowners and FWS, but also other federal agencies, the California Department of Fish and Game, Sonoma County, cities and environmentalists.
Members of the California Farm Bureau Federation are involved in developing the strategy, but CFBF spokeswoman Noelle Cremers said her group is frustrated that the agency came out with the critical habitat proposal yesterday.
"It acts to kind of put a damper on those [conservation planning] activities, if you're going to work very hard at sitting down with all of the affected parties and then in the middle of it, right before it's supposed to be finalized, have a critical habitat designation come out," Cremers said. The strategy is nearly complete and probably ready for release within a month.
FWS still hopes the strategy will eliminate the need for critical habitat, but in case it does not the agency was planning ahead because it is under a strict, court-ordered mandate to have critical habitat finalized by Dec. 1.
Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups that sued FWS to force a critical habitat designation, applauded the voluntary efforts to further salamander conservation in the county but said it should not substitute for the statutory requirement of critical habitat.
"What they're going to do is not designate critical habitat and instead say they can achieve these same benefits through this speculative strategy. The species needs critical habitat and additional conservation strategies. ... It's not going to work without both," said Siegel, noting also that based on numerous recent court rulings, she doubts that it will be legal under ESA.
Keith Kaulum, a member of the Sonoma County chapter of the Sierra Club, is a member of the group developing the voluntary conservation strategy. He is representing not only the club, but also the local chapter of the Audubon Society and the California Native Plant Society, which is concerned about endangered plants that rely, like the salamander, on vernal pools.
"Frankly I don't know enough really about how the critical habitat process is applied in these situations to say whether it would be better or not [than the voluntary conservation strategy]," Kaulum said. But he did note that in its draft form, the strategy underwent a blind peer review by four scientists and after receiving their recommendations the group changed the strategy significantly.
Overall, the strategy requires developers that develop land in salamander habitat to buy twice as much salamander habitat elsewhere as mitigation, he said. Eventually, the salamander will have 3,000 to 4,000 acres of habitat protected in salamander conservation areas strategically placed to provide contiguous habitat. He acknowledged that the strategy requires some habitat to be developed in order for any to be conserved. And he said the costs could be quite high both for purchase of the land and management of it.
Siegel noted that ESA requires the service to protect enough critical habitat to ensure the survival and recovery of the species. And in the case of the salamander, which is "at the brink of extinction," she said, mitigation of future development may not be enough. Furthermore, the strategy does not seem to address farmland.
The Sonoma County population of the California tiger salamander is one of three different groups of tiger salamanders in the state listed under the Endangered Species Act. The other two are in Central California and Santa Barbara County. All three are geographically isolated from each other and have been for thousands of years, according to Donner. The central population is the largest. The service has listed all three as threatened under ESA, but CBD and others are arguing in court that the Sonoma and Santa Barbara amphibians should be listed as endangered (Greenwire, July 27, 2004).
Environmentalists are also legally challenging FWS's decision to allow routine ranching operations in the central salamander's habitat, Donner said (Land Letter, Aug. 12, 2004). The service has designated critical habitat already for the Santa Barbara population of salamanders (Greenwire, Nov. 19, 2004), and proposed critical habitat for the central group of salamanders last August and is set to finalize that decision next week (Land Letter, July 21).
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