Endangered Sonoma County Tiger Salamander Gets Recovery Plan – via Herp Digest

For Immediate Release, June 20, 2016  Press Release from Center for Biological Diversity

SANTA ROSA, Calif.— In accordance with a settlement with the Center for Biological Diversity, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today released a final recovery plan for the endangered Sonoma County population of the California tiger salamander. The plan calls for purchase and permanent protection of approximately 15,000 acres of the salamander’s breeding ponds and adjacent uplands.

“With a recovery plan we can fight threats like habitat destruction that have pushed these salamanders to the brink of extinction,” said Jenny Loda, a biologist and attorney with the Center who is dedicated to protecting rare amphibians and reptiles. “This plan gives us hope for one of our most imperiled salamanders.”

The recovery plan focuses on alleviating the threat of habitat loss and fragmentation by permanently protecting breeding ponds and their adjacent uplands through acquisition and conservation easements. The plan also calls for restoring breeding habitats, as well as assessing and reducing risks of non-native predators, road mortality, contaminants and disease.

“Without adequate habitat protections, these salamanders can’t migrate safely between their wetland and upland homes,” said Loda. “I hope the habitat protections and other actions identified in this plan will be put in place immediately to help move these salamanders toward recovery.”

Although Sonoma County California tiger salamanders have been protected under the Endangered Species Act for more than a decade, the Fish and Wildlife Service had not developed a required recovery plan to guide management of the species. In April 2012 the Center sued the Interior Department for its failure to develop such a plan for the endangered salamanders; the plan released today is the result of the December 2012 settlement agreement that resulted from this lawsuit.

Recovery plans are the main tool for identifying actions necessary to save endangered species from extinction and eventually remove their protection under the Endangered Species Act. Research by the Center has found that the status of species with dedicated recovery plans for two or more years is far more likely to be improving than the status of those without.

Background
The California tiger salamander (Ambystoma californiense) is a large, stocky, terrestrial salamander with a broad, rounded snout and gorgeous black-and-yellow body. These amphibians are restricted to vernal pools and seasonal ponds in grassland and oak savannah communities in central California. The primary cause of their decline is the loss and fragmentation of habitat through human activities and encroachment of nonnative predators.

The Sonoma County population of California tiger salamanders was listed as endangered in 2003. This species is endemic to the Santa Rosa Plain, in central Sonoma County, Calif., and is genetically and geographically distinct from other California tiger salamanders.

For more information about the Center’s campaign to curb the amphibian and reptile extinction crisis, please visit http://BiologicalDiversity.org/herps.

Contact: Jenny Loda, (515) 441-1636, jloda@biologicaldiversity.org

New effort to save Sonoma County's tiger salamanders – via Herp Digest

By KEVIN McCALLUM , THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Last Modified: Saturday, December 22, 2012 at 3:40 p.m.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has agreed to develop a recovery plan for the endangered California tiger salamander in Sonoma County by June of 2016.

The decision announced Friday was the result of a settlement with the Center for Biological Diversity, which sued to force the federal agency to come up with a recovery plan for the stocky, spotted amphibians, which have been on the endangered list since 2002.

The agency also agreed to write recovery plans for separate populations of the salamanders in Santa Barbara and the Central Coast by 2017.

A recovery plan is “a detailed document that lays out all the things that scientists think need to get done to get the species off the list,” said Collette Adkins Giese, anattorney for the Tucson, Ariz.-based Center for Biological Diversity.

The Endangered Species Act requires the federal government to protect imperiled populations and help them recover. The agency’s guidelines call for recovery plans within 2½ years for a species being listed, Adkins Giese said.

The populations of salamanders in Santa Barbara, Sonoma and the Central Coast were listed as endangered in 2000, 2002, and 2004 respectively.

Since then, the agency had made few strides toward establishing recovery plans, partly because of political battles over the establishment of critical habitat, Adkins Giese said.

“This is the type of situation where litigation really is needed, where the agency really needed this pressure to get it back together,” she said.

The Fish and Wildlife Service does its best to prioritize the recovery plans for endangered and threatened species with limited dollars, said Michael Woodbridge, spokesman for the agency in Sacramento.

“We don’t have unlimited resources to get all these recovery plans done for all these species,” Woodbridge said.

Fourteen percent of the 221 species listed as endangered have no recovery plan, Adkins Giese said.

The Sonoma population is the most at risk of the three, with its breeding areas under significant development pressure, Adkins Giese said.

Last year the agency established 47,383 acres as “critical habitat” for the salamander, a zone 27,000 acres smaller than a plan proposed in 2005 and 2009.

The zone occupies a swath of low-lying land stretching from the northwestern outskirts of Windsor to Pepper Road just north of Petaluma, and from the main waterway of the Laguna de Santa Rosa in the west to Petaluma Hill Road in the east.

A critical habitat designation triggers an additional layer of review and habitat safeguards for projects requiring federal approval.

The recovery plan won’t change those triggers or impose additional restrictions on property owners, Adkins Giese said.

Instead it will likely focus on the kind of scientific research and habitat restoration necessary to bring the species back from the brink.

Adkins Giese said landowners with property designated critical habitat should embrace the recovery plan process because it’s “a road map for how to get that animal actually off the endangered species list.”