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Posted April 27, 1999

Student and Professor to Represent UMaine at National Workshop on Endangered Species Act

(See an earlier story about this class.)

Species recovery plans written by the federal government vary widely in how effectively they protect endangered species of plants and animals, according to an analysis by a class of University of Maine students. Steve Campbell, a member of the class and a Ph.D. student from Syracuse, New York, and Raymond O'Connor, professor of wildlife ecology from Orono, will represent UMaine in the first of two national workshops on the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in Santa Barbara, California, May 13-15.

The meetings are part of a project being conducted at 18 universities around the country to evaluate species recovery plans written by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over the past two decades.

In the first meeting, participants will conduct statistical analysis on the information extracted from the plans. The purpose of the second meeting will be to write up the results. Most participating universities are in the Midwest and West, and those in the East include Cornell, Duke and the University of Tennessee.

At each university, student teams are evaluating the plans on the basis of criteria such as amount of information on the species’ ecology and threats, public involvement, proposed management actions, and recovery progress.

The UMaine class is being taken by 15 students in the departments of Wildlife Ecology, Biological Sciences and Resource Economics and Policy. It is taught by O'Connor, Judith Rhymer, and Ray "Bucky" Owen, former commissioner of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.

Campbell has master's degrees in biology and statistics from New Mexico State University. He is beginning his graduate research at UMaine with Malcolm Hunter, professor of wildlife ecology, on the subject of forest management practices and song bird habitat.

"We spent a lot of time working through the forms that we used to evaluate the plans," says Campbell. "Each evaluation consisted of more than 2,000 entries. It was a tedious process but also a necessary one to get the information we needed."

The UMaine students evaluated recovery plans for ten wildlife species including the greenback cutthroat trout and the peregrine falcon. Each member of the class evaluated at least two plans. Campbell worked on recovery plans for the Cape Fear shiner (a freshwater fish in North Carolina) and a Hawaiian plant species.

"We found a considerable amount of variation in the quality of the plans," says Campbell. "Some were excellent and contained good information, and others were poor. The most important measure of success, of course, is the species’ recovery. However, we found that the quality of the plans as measured by the evaluation forms might not always be associated with the likelihood of successful recovery. We need to keep this in mind during the analysis stage."

The goal of the project is to make recommendations for improvements in recovery plans. The final report may be published in the journal Conservation Biology.

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