Endangered Florida panther threatened by development project, experts say

Almost half of proposed area of construction falls within hunting and roaming zone that is essential to animal’s survival

Richard Luscombe in Miami

Wed 2 Jan 2019 07.00 GMTLast modified on Wed 2 Jan 2019 14.41 GMT

The extinction of the endangered Florida panther could be hastened by a large development proposed for the state, environmental groups are warning, as a major project is expected to win approval from the Trump administration as early as April.

Up to 45,000 acres of rural Collier county in south-west Florida are earmarked for housing and commercial development under the plan drawn up by a coalition of 11 major Florida landowners, as well as new sand and gravel mines.

Several new cities would be created by the project, adding hundreds of thousands of new residents and hundreds of miles of new roadways.

But almost half of the proposed area of construction falls within what US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) scientists recognise as “primary zone” for dwindling numbers of the Florida panther, a subspecies of puma of which barely 200 adults are believed to survive.

The FWS says preservation of the entirety of the big cats’ hunting and roaming zone, which incorporates about 20,000 acres of the Collier development, is “essential for the survival of the Florida panther in the wild”.

“This area was never intended for this amount of development,” said Amber Crooks, environmental policy manager of the Conservancy of Southwest Florida.

“These parts of Collier county contain a lot of important habitat for the Florida panther and also so many other rare species and has important public lands on each corner. The best available science tells us the panther needs all its available habitat to survive and ultimately recover,” she said.

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