A Conservation Assessment Framework for Forest Carnivores

Controversy over managing public lands is neither an unexpected nor recent development. In the 1970's, debate over land management began to focus on the effects of timber management practices on wildlife. This was most evident in the Pacific Northwest where the public was beginning to express strong concerns about the effects of timber harvest in late-successional forests on northern spotted owls and other vertebrates. The focus on all vertebrates and not just "game animals" distinguished these concerns from earlier wildlife-related issues. In 1976, Congress passed the National Forest Management Act, which mandated the maintenance of biological diversity on lands of the National Forest System. Regulations enacted pursuant to this law specified that viable populations of native and desirable nonnative wildlife species would be maintained on planning units (i.e., National Forests) of the National Forest System. Thus, a statutory and regulatory basis was provided for appeals and litigation directed at what the public believed to be the negative effects of timber management practices on wildlife. The many legal challenges that ensued focused primarily on the harvesting of late-successional forests in the Pacific Northwest (see Meslow et al. 1981 for additional discussion). The USDA Forest Service responded to this situation in 1981 by chartering a research and development program aimed at studying the role of oldgrowth forests as wildlife habitat (Ruggiero et al. 1991). Early research efforts of this program focused on the ecology of spotted owls, a species at the center of the most intense debate. Although research was underway, legal challenges disrupted forest management activities, and the controversy was played out in legal and political arenas. Science was not called on as part of the solution until nearly a decade later, after the development of a political impasse in one of the country's most important timber-producing regions. In 1989, in response to this impasse, an interagency agreement between the major land management agencies established the "Interagency Scientific Committee to Address the Conservation of the Northern Spotted Owl." The charter of this group was later incorporated into law (Section 318 of Public Law 101121), and a conservation strategy for the northern spotted resulted (Thomas et al. 1990). In 1991, Congress intervened directly by commissioning the Scientific Panel on Late-Successional Forest Ecosystems, whose mission was to make broad recommendations about management of the remaining old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest (Johnson et al. 1991). And, in 1993, President Bill Clinton intervened and