8020

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 8020
• Author: Horak, G. C.
• Title: Proceedings of the Symposium on Mitigating Developmental Impacts on Fish and Wildlife.
• USFW Year: 1979.
• USFW - Doc Type: March 1979.
• Copyright Material: NO

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Dent projects, including development of prediction techniques, is vested

with the impacted state's conservation agency in coordination with the

u.s. Fish and Wildlife Service and, in recent past, the U.S. National

Marine Fisheries Service at the Federal level. Cooperative efforts to

obtain more effective input by this conservation community have resul~ed

in an almost continuous evolution of planning (including mitigation) meth-

odologies. However, the emphasis placed on review of past mitigation ef-

forts at existing projects has been negligible. Any attempt to improve

planning procedures in the absence of adequate post-impoundment evalua~

tions ~t certainly face considerable obstacles and could result in well

intentioned but poorly prefaced methodological development.

Just over s~ven years ago, the majority of fish and wildlife agencies in

the United States cooperated in a major inter-agency review of fish and

wildlife planning at water resource development projects. The Fish and

Wildlife Service, state fish and wildlife agencies and many national con-

servation organizations deliberated intensively and produced a list of 169

recommended actions to improve the fish and wildlife planning process.

These recoumendations as presented in a publication which wa. called the Act-

ion Report (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 1971), included the following:

Study projects under construction and completed to determine if
recommended fish and wildlife features are being provided, to
evaluate results of previous recommendations, and to provide
basic data for future evaluations and recommendations.

AVAILABILITY OF FISH AND WILDLIFE DATA

The effectiveness of past fish and wildlife planning was a matter of con-

cern among the construction agencies also. In 1974 the U.S. Army Corps of

Engineers awarded a contr~ct to the Sport Fisbing Institute to evaluate

41