Posted on 09/25/2002 9:48:29 AM PDT by nimc
About 1.7 million acres of land across California, including 20,000 acres in San Joaquin County, are candidates for a special designation that would help protect 15 rare plants and animals that live in vernal pools(mud puddles), officials announced Tuesday.
Critical habitat is designated to protect threatened or endangered species and could require restrictions on how the land is used.
Roughly 76 percent of the land identified Tuesday as possible critical habitat is privately owned.
To some (most intelligent) people, vernal pools are useless mud puddles that appear during the wet fall and winter months. To others, they are home to millions of tiny yet amazing creatures and plants that play a crucial role in the food chain and could lead to significant scientific discoveries.
On Tuesday, opponents of the designation decried the amount of land being considered, while environmentalists and biologists questioned whether enough is being done to protect the disappearing vernal pools.
"This has to withstand scrutiny from all sides, from people who think it's too much land to those who think it's not enough. That's why it has taken a little longer than we hoped," Fish and Wildlife Service[a federal agency] spokesman Jim Nickles said.
An economic study of the effect of the critical-habitat designation is expected in four to six weeks. A series of workshops on that study and the critical-habitat designation is planned for the next few months.
The 20,000 San Joaquin County acres up for critical-habitat consideration are near the center of the eastern county line. Three rare species are thought to live there: the threatened vernal pool fairy shrimp; the endangered vernal pool tadpole shrimp; and succulent owl's clover, a plant.
Steve Stocking, a San Joaquin Delta College botany and biology professor, said he wouldn't be surprised if the federal agency were pressured to cut the number of protected acres drastically because of landowner opposition.
However, there are still huge chunks of land in San Joaquin County that probably should have been included, he said.
"The northeast and southeast parts of the county, I would say, are worth protecting, because they are large-enough vernal pool areas. But even a moderate amount of acreage is a benefit," Stocking said.
DNA in fairy shrimp, which survive long dry seasons before springing to life when rainwater forms pools in Valley fields, could lead to engineered crops that survive long droughts, Stocking suggested.( Fairy Shrimp are as common as flies.)
"There are a lot of possibilities, so the bottom line to biologists is that it doesn't make sense to endanger in any way a species we don't know enough about at this point in time," he said.
Robin Rivett, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, has represented groups that doubt the fairy shrimp is endangered. Landowners included in the new designation will lose money because of the federal restrictions, he said.
"If you have a cow walking through a vernal pool and stomping on fairy shrimp, that could constitute (illegal killing) of the species," he said. "Protecting yourself from that takes a lot of time and money."
The maps of the proposed habitat designations come after years of settlement talks with the Butte Environmental Council, which sued the government in the mid-1990s over its failure to designate critical vernal pool habitat.
Barbara Vlamis, executive director of the council, said (I've got this degree in biology see, and I need some big federal bucks to study this for the rest of my life.)people shouldn't brush off the importance of the vernal pool species.
It's a critical link to the food chain for migratory waterfowl like ducks. Though people try to trivialize what's small and helpless, frequently those things have a much larger effect than anyone realizes," Vlamis said.
She said more than 80 percent of vernal pools in California have been destroyed. ( B.S.
Bruce Blodgett of the California Farm Bureau said the large amount of land up for consideration should indicate that the 15 targeted species aren't as rare as once thought.
"It looks like this has been used as justification to bring a wider swath of area under regulation," (DUH) he said.
(Emphasis mine)
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