8011

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 8011
• Author: Hood, L. C., et al.
• Title: Frayed Safety Nets, Conservation Planning Under the Endangered Species Act 1998.
• USFW Year: 1998.
• USFW - Doc Type: Washington D.C.
• Copyright Material: YES

:........'.'.."..'."..........'..'........'...................."..'...'....................'."."..".'...'........'.'....................... .......................... F RAY E 0

e

justification, this manual only requires half as
much foraging habitat as required on federal
land. Moreover, these requirements apply to
landowners throughout the woodpecker's range,
even though habitat requirements are dramatical-
ly variable among geographic regions. Clearly,
private landowners have benefited from this geo-
graphic variability and uncertainty concerning
woodpecker habitat.
Although this issue of minimal foraging
requirements is unresolved, the private lands
manual contains a clearly risky strategy in allow-
ing private landowners to have substantially
reduced requirements for woodpecker habitat.
Not only has the manual for private lands gov-
erned take prohibitions since 1992, but it is the
basis for the baseline requirements of landowners
in safe-harbor agreements like the sandhills pro-
gram and various statewide HCPs for red-cock-
aded woodpeckers. Landowners who participate
in the safe-harbor program must maintain only
60 acres of habitat per woodpecker group that
lives on the property today. The agreements
extend for 99 years. Therefore, if new scientific
information indicates that current regulations are
insufficient, the baseline cannot increase.

In addition to the difficulty of defining nec-
essary amounts of habitat for species, still less is
known about what actually constitutes landscape
connectivity or corridors between preserved
areas. There is, in fact, no clear scientific con-
sensus on whether corridors facilitate movement
for target species (Cox 1992) and whether the
potential benefits of wildlife corridors, such as
demographic support and prevention of genetic
inbreeding (Noss 1987), outweigh the potential

SAFETY NETS

problems, such as facilitation of the spread of
disease or exotic species between preserves, and
the economic cost of setting aside corridors

(Hess 1994; Simberloff and Cox 1987;
Simberloff et al. 1992). In addition, corridors
designed for particular target species may not
function effectively for other taxa (e.g., a large
mammal corridor under a highway may not help
some invertebrates). Moreover, focusing on cor-
ridors may overlook other important aspects of
landscape connectivity, such as the habitat quali-
ty of all elements of a planning area and their
spatial configuration (Taylor et al. 1993).
Nevertheless, conservation planning must allow
for movement of individuals between preserves
of high quality habitat, especially when (1) areas
not set aside for habitat will certainly be convert-
ed or degraded and (2) habitat patches by them-
selves do not sustain viable populations.
The third essential component is the protec-
tion of areas that are not currently occupied by
endangered species to prevent the species from
becoming limited to current locations without
the ability to move to new areas if necessary.
This is one respect in which conservation plans
can go beyond the prohibition of "take" in the
ESA, in which landowners must not harm occu-
pied habitat. This protection must be tied to
monitoring that can determine whether unoccu-
pied areas become colonized. Unfortunately, it
will be extremely difficult to understand how
animals colonize unoccupied, protected habitats
when some monitoring programs keep track only
of occupied habitats to determine when they are
abandoned, as occurs with many HCPs in the
Pacific Northwest for the northern spotted owl