New Approach to Protecting Fragile Habitats Criticized
A much-touted national blueprint that allows development in environmentally fragile areas has sometimes failed to provide sufficient monitoring or data to ensure that plants and animals are protected from extinction, the draft of a major new study concludes.
Championed by the Clinton administration, Habitat Conservation Plans have been crafted nationwide as a pioneering means of balancing the welfare of rare wildlife with the pressures of economic growth. As conceived, they were to make peace between the two sides and avoid costly litigation, allowing developers to build while keeping fragile habitat intact.
But the draft study, developed by a research team from eight universities, indicates that some plans lacked scientific input and raises warning flags about whether some species--from rare tortoises to delicate flowers--are receiving the protection government regulators envisioned in pacts with developers, lumber companies and other landowners.
Among its recommendations, the draft study issues a strong and urgent call for changes in future Habitat Conservation Plans, or HCPs. It presses for basic scientific standards and suggests changing the law to require review of proposed plans by independent experts. And it urges more sharing of information, noting that no centralized library appears to exist for the more than 200 plans already in place.
The study was sponsored jointly by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at UC Santa Barbara and the American Institute of Biological Sciences based in Washington. It was developed over the past year by 13 faculty members and 106 graduate students from eight universities nationwide. Its findings are expected to be published by the end of the year.
When finalized, the study is expected to be the most complete scientific report card to date of one of the most significant federal environmental initiatives of the 1990s. It also is expected to fuel a mounting debate over whether the plans constitute a landmark conservation effort or, as some environmentalists claim, skimp on biological research to placate developers.
Although it found that the designers of the plans generally do a good job of gathering what details they can find about key plants and animals, it also showed there were gaps, not just in the scientific underpinnings of some plans, but in society’s knowledge of the biology of rare species.
“We just don’t know the information, and we don’t for an awful lot of species,” said Peter Kareiva, the University of Washington zoology professor who led the study. Still, he believes that with some reforms, the Habitat Conservation Plan approach can be made to work.
“It’s not like in principle, it can’t work,” he said.
The findings could have particular impact in California, where 2.3 million acres of land are covered by 50 approved HCPs, from timberlands near the Oregon border to sage-specked hills overlooking Mexico.
“Southern California is one of the most important places in the world to be having this discussion,” said Frank Davis, a UC Santa Barbara professor and deputy director of the National Center at the university.
The study is widely anticipated in Washington, and some scientists involved in the report and other experts briefed Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt on key points when they met with him in May to discuss their concerns with HCPs.
“It’s absolutely clear that this is the most comprehensive review of HCPs that’s been done,” said Dee Boersma, president of the Society for Conservation Biology and a University of Washington professor.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has experts at its offices nationwide review the draft, and a formal agency response is due later this summer, said Laverne Smith, chief of the agency’s Division of Endangered Species. She expressed concern about reporting on preliminary findings, adding that her agency could not comment until its critique is finished.
Douglas Wheeler, California secretary of resources, who has reviewed the draft study, said: “I take from the report not that we’ve done a good job or a bad job, but the approach we’ve taken is the right approach, which is to rely on science when it’s available.”
HCPs have been lauded with increasing fervor in Washington and Sacramento during the 1990s as a means of balancing the demands of development with the stringent standards of the Endangered Species Act. Babbitt has been among the program’s leading mentors.
*
In short, the program allows developers to destroy habitat containing some rare species as long as other habitat is set aside and managed for species protection. For example, Orange County’s largest developer, the Irvine Co., negotiated with regulators to craft a 37,000-acre preserve for the California gnatcatcher and other rare creatures. The developer, in turn, was granted freedom from endangered species laws on certain land outside the preserve.
The Orange County plan assembled a massive piece of habitat larger than the cities of Costa Mesa and Irvine combined that is managed to protect species, said Laer Pearce, executive director of the Coalition for Habitat Conservation, a landowner group. He called the review process rigorous.
“I’ve watched the process up close and personal, and seen the level of review involved in it. It’s been a tough, tough process,” Pearce said.
The draft study champions the importance of science in creating HCPs--a process that some critics say can be driven more by economics and politics than by biology. Because HCPs are compromises, understanding what each side has at stake is important.
“It is easy to identify what is given up from the viewpoint of a private landowner--since the dollar value of future land development or exploitation is readily calculable,” the study states.
“It is much harder to quantify what is given up in terms of a species’ prospects for long-term survival. That is the challenge for the scientific component of HCPs.”
The study examined 208 plans, or most of those in place in 1997. It examined 43 plans in-depth, including the Orange County plan and one in San Diego County. More than half involved construction, with another quarter related to logging.
The smallest plan studied is a project just four-tenths of an acre intended to protect the Florida scrub jay. The largest is a plan on 1.6 million acres in western Washington state containing the Northern spotted owl and the grizzly bear.
The draft concludes that many existing plans do not estimate the specific number of plants and animals that may be harmed or destroyed. And only a small fraction of 43 habitat plans studied in-depth contain clear monitoring programs adequate for measuring success of the plans, according to the study.
“I was surprised by the monitoring,” Kareiva said. “I thought that without too much effort or expense, we could do a lot better monitoring. Otherwise, there’s no way of finding out if they’re effective or not.”
Plans must often be completed quickly by an overworked staff. “Often, the time pressure under which they’re put together is enormous,” said Kareiva. He said he felt tremendous sympathy for the Fish and Wildlife Service, which has been deeply involved in the process. The explosion of HCPs “puts a huge workload on them” Kareiva said.
With the right safeguards in place, however, these and other plans should be capable of protecting species, said Kareiva and several other scientists, including Fran James, a professor in biological science at Florida State University who is involved with the study.
One bright spot in some plans, James said, is how they manage sensitive habitats using such techniques as controlling harmful nonnative weeds that can crowd out sensitive native plants. And few other tools besides HCPs are available to manage endangered species on private land, she said.
“This tool, even though it has its flaws, we really need to think positively about how to make it better,” said James, immediate past president of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.
*
The study comes at a crucial juncture for HCPs, which grew out of a 1982 change in the Endangered Species Act that gave landowners more flexibility in dealing with rare plants and animals. The first such plan in the nation was created on San Bruno Mountain south of San Francisco to protect the fragile Mission blue butterfly.
California has become a focal point for HCP planning, in part because 237 of the state’s plants and animals are federally listed as endangered or threatened--more than any other state except Hawaii. More impetus came in 1991 when Gov. Pete Wilson launched a state effort known as the Natural Community Conservation Planning program that has yielded some of the largest and most ambitious plans in the nation.
More proposals are in the pipeline, such as a wide-ranging draft HCP proposal released last week for public review covering the bitterly contested Headwaters forest land in Northern California.
Yet, a spate of recent letters from scientists and reports from groups such as Defenders of Wildlife and the National Wildlife Foundation have questioned aspects of the program. Even so, those environmentalists consider the study to be the most comprehensive to date because of its sharp focus on science and the use of voluminous data from plans nationwide.
“Overall, I don’t see how a study could have been done better,” said Peter Brussard, a biology professor at the University of Nevada at Reno who has worked with the HCP program. “It’s probably as free of bias as any of those studies can be.”
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Safety Net?
An effort to balance economic and environmental interests has led to the creation of Habitat Conservation Plans in California and nationwide. Today, 50 plans protect dozens of species statewide. Some of the plan areas and the wildlife protected:
Northern California
*--*
Plan Area Acres Start Blackhawk Pipeline 5 1996 Natomas 53,342 1997 North of Playa 33 1996 Parkside Homes 25 1996 Quail Hollow 32 1997 Regli Estate 500 1995 San Bruno Mountain 3,324 1983* Seascape Uplands 192 1997 Simpson Timber 380,000 1992 Teichert Vernalis 497 1997
*--*
Southern California
*--*
Plan Area Acres Start Arco Western Energy 120,320 1996 Chevron Pipeline 26 1996 Coachella Valley 70,000 1986 Cushenbury Sand & Gravel 200 1996 Fieldstone 1,918 1995 Kern Water Bank 19,900 1997 Lake Mathews 5,110 1995 Metropolitan Bakersfield 262,000 1994 Ocean Trails 270 1997 Orange County Central/Coastal 208,000 1996 Poway Subarea 25,000 1996 Riverside County 540,000 1996 San Diego County 582,243** 1997 San Diego Gas & Electric -- 1995 Shell Oil Co. 3,216 1996
*--*
Northern spotted owl: Protected in Simpson Timber plan.
San Joaquin kit fox: Endangered, listed in 1967. Protected by plans in Kern County.
California jewelflower: Endangered, listed in 1990. Protected by plans in Kern County.
Mission blue butterfly: Endangered, listed in 1976. Protected by San Bruno Mountain plan.
California coastal gnatcatcher. Threatened, listed in 1993. Protected by several Southern California plans.
Sources: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management
