Conservation Planning for US National Forests: Conducting Comprehensive Biodiversity Assessments

T US National Forest Management Act (NFMA) is an essential statute for maintaining biotic diversity on 192 million acres of national forests and national grasslands. It was enacted in 1976 as reform legislation in response to environmental impacts from timber harvest, grazing, and mining on national forest lands, which the public and Congress found increasingly unacceptable (Wilkinson and Anderson 1987). Among many provisions for resource protection, a primary emphasis was the protection of individual species. The statutory language of NFMA requires management of the national forests and grasslands to “provide for diversity of plant and animal communities based on the suitability and capability of the specific land area in order to meet overall multiple-use objectives” (16 US Code 1604[g][3][B]). Since 1982, the regulations governing implementation of NFMA have addressed this diversity provision by requiring that “fish and wildlife habitat shall be managed to maintain viable populations of existing native and desired non-native vertebrate species in the planning area” (36 Code of Federal Regulations, sec. 219.19, app. 13). Revisions to NFMA regulations adopted in 2000 retained the requirement for viable populations and expanded it to include all plant and animal species (Federal Register 65 [218]: 67514–67581). Although NFMA has remained essentially unchanged since its enactment, the US Forest Service has now proposed regulations that eliminate an explicit population viability requirement and that restrict management responsibility to vertebrates and vascular plants (Federal Register 67 [235]: 72770–72816). The proposed regulations require only a “hierarchical, sequential approach to consider and assess both ecosystem diversity and species diversity” and that the Forest Service “identify species for which substantive evidence exists that continued persistence in the planning or assessment area is at risk, specific risks or threats to these species, and measures required for their conservation or restoration”(Federal Register 67 [235]: 72801). No specific language to compel species-level analyses of viability has been proposed. Moreover, the proposed regulations would subsume the existing species conservation requirement into a landscape assessment process that would use a variety of unproven