Service Announces Recovery Plan Revisions for 43 Species, To Assist in Measuring Progress and Addressing Threats

As part of an agency-wide effort to advance the recovery of our nation’s most imperiled species, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has made publicly available draft revisions for 29 Endangered Species Act (ESA) recovery plans that provide a recovery roadmap for 43 federally protected species. This is the third batch of revised recovery plans, and is part of the Department of the Interior’s Agency Priority Performance Goals, which call for all ESA recovery plans to include quantitative criteria on what constitutes recovery by September 2019.

Recovery plans are non-regulatory guidance documents that identify, organize and prioritize recovery actions, set measurable recovery objectives, and include time and cost estimates. In total, the Service will revise up to 182 recovery plans covering some 305 species listed under the ESA.

The Service’s success in preventing extinctions and recovering species is due to ESA-inspired partnerships with diverse stakeholders, such as state, federal, and tribal wildlife agencies, industry, conservation groups and citizens. Each species for which recovery criteria are being revised in this effort has undergone or is currently undergoing a status review that considers the best scientific and commercial data that have become available since the species’ listing or most recent status review. This information includes: (1) the biology of the species, (2) habitat conditions, (3) conservation measures that have benefitted the species, (4) threat status and trends in relation to the five listing factors, and (5) other information, data, or corrections.

As such, these revisions reflect scientific and informational updates, which have been gained from years of collaborative work with our partners. Revisions benefit endangered and threatened species, our partners, and the public by sharing the best available information about what is really needed to achieve recovery.

Under guidance established in 2010, partial revisions, such as amendments, allow the Service to update recovery plans with the latest science and information without having to revise the entire plan, which can be a time- and resource-intensive undertaking. (This batch includes both amendments and full recovery plan revisions, as noted in below table.)

There will be a 30-day comment period on the proposed revisions, ending on July 29, 2019. We are requesting submission of any information that may help achieve (1) the necessary understanding of species’ biology, threats and recovery needs; (2) identification of implementation issues and concerns; and (3) facilitation of more effective implementation, associated with these draft revisions that update recovery criteria for these 43 species.

The plan revisions cover the following species:

1 Denotes a full recovery plan revision.
2 Denotes a recovery plan amendment