When the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) first introduced the Pinedale Anticline Oil and Gas Exploration and Development Project on the mesa near Pinedale, Wyoming, in 2000, the agency was applauded for its progressive venture "to showcase adaptive management and its potential to mitigate environmental concerns while facilitating development." Now, more than a decade later, the project may have more to offer as a "case study focusing on barriers to adaptive management," than as a flagship example of flexible, science-based decision making, reports the Wildlife Management Institute.

Despite the BLM's initial and laudable objective to emphasize "performance based outcomes and adaptive management for reducing impacts," recent research and policy decisions paint a grim reality of the project's past and future impacts to the Pinedale ecosystem.

Within the 200,000-acre project area, mule deer abundance has plummeted by 60 percent, sage grouse leks in proximity to the site's 1,500 natural gas wells are in decline, and ozone pollution in nearby Pinedale has spiked to levels two-thirds higher than the Environmental Protection Agency's maximum recommended limit. The area once known as the "American Serengeti" has experienced smog levels higher than the worst air pollution day documented in Los Angeles last year.

Early attempts to address proactively the inevitable and yet unknown ecological impacts of the drilling were confounded by federal requirements that made stakeholder participation difficult. The oversight group created to guide the fledgling adaptive management process became immediately bogged down in a legal battle, and early warning signs of declining wildlife populations were largely lost in the process or simply ignored. All the while, gas and oil extraction continued.

In an attempt to address the increasing concerns, the BLM published a new Record of Decision in 2008, which introduced a development process titled Concentrated Phase Development. The new plan did away with seasonal drilling restrictions designed to protect sensitive wintering habitat for deer and grouse in favor of year-round drilling in clustered locations. In an effort to reduce truck use by 164,000 trips, the plan also required the construction of pipelines that could rapidly transport gas and water to and from drilling sites.

In theory, the plan was designed as a "get-in, get-out reclaim" process that assumed wildlife would be content to move elsewhere during development and then return to reclaimed areas once work was complete. In practice, wildlife populations continued to decline precipitously (dropping well below established thresholds designed to activate "serious mitigation efforts"), and drilling persisted toward a new well production goal six times higher than the limit set in the 2000 plan.

Unfortunately, recently proposed management policies offer no significant course correction to current development practices. In late February, and in response to the dwindling deer herd, the BLM introduced a mitigation plan, that focused primarily on habitat improvement measures and suggested no alterations to drilling methods or restrictions. As similar mitigation efforts have already been underway for several years, wildlife managers are concerned that the proposed mitigation will do little to alter current impacts to the area's deer herd and other wildlife.

"It has already been shown that this mitigation is not working," said Dr. Rollin Sparrowe, a retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist and Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership board member. "This is not adaptive management."?

In addition, habitat mitigation likely could not significantly increase even if it were shown to be effective. The $36 million monitoring and mitigation fund voluntarily set up by industry partners already has been spent down by nearly half, leaving little to address management and monitoring needs for the next 20 years.

Further limiting the plan's ability to respond to natural resource degradation caused by drilling is the absence of defined goals and objects in the BLM's Wildlife Monitoring and Mitigation Matrix (WMMM) for wildlife populations within the project area.

According to independent reviews of the WMMM by leading researchers and land managers, the monitoring guidelines needed to protect natural resources during the Concentrated Phase Development process are "scientifically unsound," "not adequately specified," "inconsistently defined" and insufficient to document accurately the criteria needed to trigger mitigation efforts. Compounding the problem is that specific ecological thresholds, such as minimum deer densities, have not been established for the impacted areas. "Adaptive management only works if target indicators are identified and responded to during the management process," said Sparrowe. "It's disheartening to see an instance where such good science is available and so little of it is being applied."

Biologists and land managers alike are concerned that the process driving the Pinedale gas and oil development will set a dangerous precedent for the future management of the 16 million acres of active and 22 million acres of inactive gas and oil leases currently present in the United States. While the adaptive management process may hold promise for facilitating a balance between energy development and wildlife conservation, the current political and regulatory framework appears to place a much higher premium on the 21 trillion cubic feet of natural gas trapped beneath the Pinedale Anticline than on the wildlife resources above it. (mcd)