The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) announced on May 10 that it has created a six-year work plan to review and address systematically the needs of the 251 species on the 2010 candidate list for endangered species status, reports the Wildlife Management Institute.The plan is part of an agreement with one of the agency's most frequent plaintiffs in endangered species cases, the WildEarth Guardians, within a consolidated case before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

If agreed to by the court, the plan will enable the FWS to prioritize its workload based on the needs of candidate species, while also providing state wildlife agencies, stakeholders and other partners clarity and certainty about when listing determinations will be made.

"This work plan will serve as a catalyst to move past the gridlock and acrimony of the past several years, enabling us to be more efficient and effective in both getting species on the list and working with our partners to recover those species and get them off the list as soon as possible," said FWS Acting Director Rowan Gould. "This is just the first step in our efforts to actively engage conservation partners and the public in the search for improved and innovative ways to conserve and recover imperiled species."

In recent years, the FWS has been inundated with petitions to list species and with lawsuits to force consideration of various species. More than 1,200 petitions have been filed in just the last four years, 754 of which came from WildEarth Guardians. The number of associated court orders, settlement-agreement obligations and statutory deadlines related to petition findings along with other endangered species litigation has consumed most of the agency's budget and staff. To attempt to take a comprehensive and more efficient approach to these diverse lawsuits, the FWS asked to consolidate pending court consideration from a number of different district courts to the District Court for the District of Columbia. The recent agreement stems from these consolidated cases.

The proposed work plan lays out a schedule whereby the FWS will make listing determinations for species that have been identified as candidates as well as for a number of species that have been petitioned for listing. FWS Assistant Director for Endangered Species, Gary Frazer, suggested that a majority of the 251 listing decisions would end up as listed as endangered or threatened. In return the WildEarth Guardians has agreed to dismiss active lawsuits and not file new suits for missed deadlines over the next six years and to limit listing petitions to no more than 10 species each year.

The negotiated agreement had initially included the Center for Biological Diversity, another top litigant of the FWS who was responsible for many of the other petitions in the last four years, but that group pulled out of the discussions at the last minute. (jas)