USA: Indicator Species policy on USFS lands
How do you take the pulse of a forest? Can you look at one bird species, check its population, its breeding success, the extent of its territory, and learn something meaningful about a patch of old growth or a stand of lowland conifers? Under the 1982 guidelines for the National Forest Management Act, the Forest Service was supposed to use indicator species to determine if activities such as logging were damaging its lands.
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The ideal indicator would be dependent on a specific habitat. By tracking its population, land managers could get a glimpse of the health of the habitat and the other animals that relied on it. The northern spotted owl was linked to Northwestern old growth, the Merriam’s wild turkey to piñon-juniper forests, the mountain quail to chaparral.
Some forests used five indicator species, all birds. Others, like the Klamath National Forest in California and Oregon, used dozens, ranging from the tailed frog to the northern water shrew. From the beginning, some researchers were skeptical about this approach. “If we want to know what the condition of our forests is, why don’t we just measure that?” asks one longtime biologist with the Forest Service, who doesn’t want his name used. “Why measure it through a surrogate when we can measure it directly?”
If you want to know the condition of a stream, take the water temperature and test the water quality. If you want to know the condition of a stand of trees, look at the age and diameter and canopy closure and the number of non-native species. And manage for specific future landscape goals — for instance, that the forest should be 20 percent old growth 50 years from now — providing a wide variety of habitats able to withstand the inevitable disturbances caused by fire, insects and global warming. The idea makes intuitive sense, but there’s little consensus about what “ecosystem management” looks like or how to gauge its success or failure. Some definitions are based on specific, measurable targets. Some stress “a planning timeline of centuries.” And others, written by the timber industry, focus on human needs as key ecosystem components.
Last April, the Forest Service released its
latest rewrite of the indicator species rule, touting “ecosystem
management” and confirming conservationists’ fears that the agency
planned to water down wildlife protection. The 2008 version scraps
requirements for monitoring indicator species and maintaining native
species viability, saying they aren’t feasible. A coalition of
environmental groups promptly sued, asking for a return to the 1982
rule. A hearing is scheduled this month. According to Taylor McKinnon,
public-lands program director for the Center for Biological Diversity,
which is one of the parties to the lawsuit, indicator species, along
with the viability requirement and the monitoring they demand, help
hold the Forest Service accountable for the state of the forests.
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