By KEVIN
McCALLUM , THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Last
Modified: Saturday, December 22, 2012 at 3:40 p.m.
The
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has agreed to develop a recovery plan for the
endangered California tiger salamander in Sonoma County by June of 2016.
The
decision announced Friday was the result of a settlement with the Center for
Biological Diversity, which sued to force the federal agency to come up with a
recovery plan for the stocky, spotted amphibians, which have been on the
endangered list since 2002.
The
agency also agreed to write recovery plans for separate populations of the
salamanders in Santa Barbara and the Central Coast by 2017.
A
recovery plan is “a detailed document that lays out all the things that
scientists think need to get done to get the species off the list,” said
Collette Adkins Giese, anattorney for the Tucson, Ariz.-based Center for
Biological Diversity.
The
Endangered Species Act requires the federal government to protect imperiled
populations and help them recover. The agency’s guidelines call for recovery
plans within 2½ years for a species being listed, Adkins Giese said.
The
populations of salamanders in Santa Barbara, Sonoma and the Central Coast were
listed as endangered in 2000, 2002, and 2004 respectively.
Since
then, the agency had made few strides toward establishing recovery plans,
partly because of political battles over the establishment of critical habitat,
Adkins Giese said.
“This
is the type of situation where litigation really is needed, where the agency
really needed this pressure to get it back together,” she said.
The
Fish and Wildlife Service does its best to prioritize the recovery plans for
endangered and threatened species with limited dollars, said Michael
Woodbridge, spokesman for the agency in Sacramento.
“We
don’t have unlimited resources to get all these recovery plans done for all
these species,” Woodbridge said.
Fourteen
percent of the 221 species listed as endangered have no recovery plan, Adkins
Giese said.
The
Sonoma population is the most at risk of the three, with its breeding areas
under significant development pressure, Adkins Giese said.
Last year
the agency established 47,383 acres as “critical habitat” for the salamander, a
zone 27,000 acres smaller than a plan proposed in 2005 and 2009.
The
zone occupies a swath of low-lying land stretching from the northwestern
outskirts of Windsor to Pepper Road just north of Petaluma, and from the main
waterway of the Laguna de Santa Rosa in the west to Petaluma Hill Road in the
east.
A
critical habitat designation triggers an additional layer of review and habitat
safeguards for projects requiring federal approval.
The
recovery plan won’t change those triggers or impose additional restrictions on property
owners, Adkins Giese said.
Instead
it will likely focus on the kind of scientific research and habitat restoration
necessary to bring the species back from the brink.
Adkins
Giese said landowners with property designated critical habitat should embrace
the recovery plan process because it’s “a road map for how to get that animal
actually off the endangered species list.”
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