Public Communication Practices and Beliefs Among Conservation Scientists and Practitioners in a Midwest U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Program.

Public communication is increasingly recognized as a key component in successful natural resource management within government agencies responsible for conservation. However, communication practices and beliefs among government conservation scientists and practitioners are not well studied or understood. Herein, we present the results of a communication survey disseminated to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) employees working for the agency’s Ecological Services program, a program charged with endangered species recovery. We asked respondents about public communication practices and beliefs, and factors that may motivate or discourage participation in public communication activities. Study respondents reported the lowest levels of participation in media-related, one-way communication activities, including writing educational materials and answering media inquiries, and the engaging in one-on-one communication with stakeholders most frequently. While our results suggest respondents engage in frequent two-way communication with stakeholders, our results also suggest they mostly communicate with stakeholders remotely, and especially by email, rather than in-person. Furthermore, only 36% reported they go out of their way to visit people in communities. On the other hand, a majority agreed they learn new things about species and landscapes (80%) from conversations with stakeholders and often use this knowledge to solve conservation problems (89%). With respect to factors that encouraging and discouraging participation, 93% of respondents indicated a desire to produce better conservation outcomes motivates them to communicate with stakeholders and the public. Many agreed that a lack of time was an obstacle to participating in public communication (68%), but an even larger majority (86%) indicated public unfamiliarity with USFWS presented a barrier to public communication. Similarly, majority of employees also agreed public and stakeholder unfamiliarity with themselves and their work, also presented a communication barrier (62%). Our findings suggest agencies responsible for conservation may want to assess whether agency and its employees adequately invest in communication activities that foster public familiarity with the agency and its employees.

Eumops floridanus (Chiroptera: Molossidae)

Eumops floridanus (Allen, 1932) is a molossid commonly called the Florida bonneted bat or the Florida mastiff bat. Eumops floridanus is the largest species of bat in Florida and is one of 16 species in the genus Eumops. With one of the smallest distributions of any bat in the United States, it is endemic to southern peninsular Florida where it roosts in cavities of live and dead trees and man-made structures. Eumops floridanus was formerly classified as a subspecies of E. glaucinus but has been elevated to species level based on morphology. Due primarily to its restricted distribution, small population size, and the continued loss of habitat, E. floridanus is federally listed as “Endangered” (EN) by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.

Book review: Forensic Taphonomy and Ecology of North American Scavengers

BY Susan N Sincerbox and Elizabeth A DiGangi. Academic Press, 2017. Paperback ISBN: 9780128132432; eBook ISBN: 9780128132630. DOI: 10.1016/C2016-0-04706-X. 232 pages. US$49.95. REVIEW BY Tabitha Viner, DVM DACVP; National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Ashland, Oregon.

Using Decision Science for Monitoring Threatened Western Snowy Plovers to Inform Recovery

Western Snowy Plovers (Charadrius nivosus nivosus) are federally listed under the US Endangered Species Act as Threatened. They occur along the US Pacific coastline and are threatened by habitat loss and destruction and excessive levels of predation and human disturbance. Populations have been monitored since the 1970s for distribution, reproduction, and survival. Since the species was federally listed in 1993 and a recovery plan was approved under the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 2007, recovery actions have resulted in growing populations with increased presence at breeding and wintering sites throughout their Pacific Coast range. This success has created logistical challenges related to monitoring a recovering species and a need for identifying and instituting the best monitoring approach given recovery goals, budgets, and the likelihood of monitoring success. We devised and implemented a structured decision analysis to evaluate nine alternative monitoring strategies. The analysis included inviting plover biologists involved in monitoring to score each strategy according to a suite of performance measures. Using multi-attribute utility theory, we combined scores across the performance measures for each monitoring strategy, and applied weighted utility values to show the implications of tradeoffs and find optimal decisions. We evaluated four scenarios for weighting the monitoring objectives and how risk attitude affects optimal decisions. This resulted in identifying six strategies that best meet recovery needs and were Pareto optimal for cost-effective monitoring. Results were presented to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, responsible for monitoring as well as for consideration to ensure consistent monitoring methods across the species’ range. Our use of structured decision-making can be applied to cases of other species once imperiled but now on the road to recovery.

Recovery plans need better science to support decisions that allow species to decline in abundance but be recovered

The U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) is widely considered the strongest biodiversity conservation law in the world. Part of its strength comes from the mandate to use the best available science to make decisions under the law, including whether to list a species, setting the criteria for when a species can be considered recovered, and determining when those criteria have been met and a species can be delisted. Both biological status and threat factors are considered at each stage of the listing and delisting process. In most cases, conservation science would suggest that species at risk enough to be listed under the Act should be more abundant and secure at delisting than they were at listing. Surprisingly, we identified 130 ESA-listed species that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service could consider recovered with fewer populations or individuals than existed at the time of listing. We ask whether their ESA recovery plans present scientific data, rationale, or evidence to support a decline in abundance as part of recovery. We find that almost no plan clearly explains why a decline is allowed. Fewer than half of the plans provide scientific support for a decline in the form of literature references or modeling results. We recommend that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service create a decision support system to inform when species can decline in abundance and still recover, including guidance on (a) the need to explicitly address the declines and (b) the science used to support the decisions.

Patterns of head shape and scutellation in Drymarchon couperi (Squamata: Colubridae) reveal a single species

Krysko et al. (2016a) used analyses of DNA sequence data to reveal two genetic lineages of Drymarchon couperi. The Atlantic lineage contained specimens from southeastern Georgia and eastern peninsular Florida, and the Gulf Coast lineage contained specimens from western and southern peninsular Florida as well as western Florida, southern Alabama, and southern Mississippi. In a second paper Krysko et al. (2016b) analyzed morphological variation of the two lineages, which allowed them to restrict D. couperi to the Atlantic lineage and to describe the Gulf Coast lineage as a new species, Drymarchon kolpobasileus. This taxonomic discovery was remarkable for such a large, wide-ranging species and was notable for its impact on conservation. Because of population declines, particularly in western Florida, southern Alabama, and southern Mississippi, D. couperi (sensu lato) was listed as Threatened under the Endangered Species Act (United States Fish and Wildlife Service 1978, 2008) and repatriation of the species to areas where it had been extirpated was listed as a priority conservation goal (United States Fish and Wildlife Service 1982, 2008). Such repatriation efforts were attempted in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, starting in 1977 (Speake et al. 1987), but failed to create viable populations, likely because too few snakes were released at too many sites (Guyer et al. 2019; Folt et al. 2019a). A second attempt at repatriation was started in 2010 and concentrated on release of snakes at a single site in Alabama (Stiles et al. 2013). However, Krysko et al. (2016a) criticized this repatriation effort because it appeared to involve release of D. couperi (sensu stricto) into the geographic region occupied by D. kolpobasileus (as diagnosed in Krysko et al. 2016b).