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Data contradict common perceptions about a controversial provision of the US Endangered Species Act
Edited by Michael Kraft, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, WI, and accepted by the Editorial Board October 30, 2015 (received for review August 25, 2015)
This article has a Letter. Please see:
See related content:
- Data over anecdote- Mar 02, 2016

Significance
The US Endangered Species Act is the most comprehensive law any nation has enacted to protect imperiled species. Many of its protections come from section 7 of the Act, but how government regulators use this tool is poorly understood. Our analysis is the first to systematically evaluate how the US Fish and Wildlife Service has implemented section 7 over an extend timeframe and across all listed species. The results inform current efforts to improve the conservation effectiveness of section 7 and rebut certain claims about the regulatory burdens of complying with section 7.
Abstract
Separating myth and reality is essential for evaluating the effectiveness of laws. Section 7 of the US Endangered Species Act (Act) directs federal agencies to help conserve threatened and endangered species, including by consulting with the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) or National Marine Fisheries Service on actions the agencies authorize, fund, or carry out. Consultations ensure that actions do not violate the Act’s prohibitions on “jeopardizing” listed species or “destroying or adversely modifying” these species’ critical habitat. Because these prohibitions are broad, many people consider section 7 the primary tool for protecting species under the Act, whereas others believe section 7 severely impedes economic development. This decades-old controversy is driven primarily by the lack of data on implementation: past analyses are either over 25 y old or taxonomically restricted. We analyze data on all 88,290 consultations recorded by FWS from January 2008 through April 2015. In contrast to conventional wisdom about section 7 implementation, no project was stopped or extensively altered as a result of FWS finding jeopardy or adverse modification during this period. We also show that median consultation duration is far lower than the maximum allowed by the Act, and several factors drive variation in consultation duration. The results discredit many of the claims about the onerous nature of section 7 but also raise questions as to how federal agencies could apply this tool more effectively to conserve species. We build on the results to identify ways to improve the effectiveness of consultations for imperiled species conservation and increase the efficiency of consultations.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: jmalcom{at}defenders.org.
Author contributions: J.W.M. and Y.-W.L. designed research, performed research, analyzed data, and wrote the paper.
Conflict of interest statement: The authors are employed by Defenders of Wildlife; the results do not necessarily reflect the positions of Defenders of Wildlife.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. M.K. is a guest editor invited by the Editorial Board.
Data deposition: The code for the application used in the analyses available at GitHub (https://github.com/Defenders-ESC/section7_explorer). The data is available both from the GitHub repository and from within the web application.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1516938112/-/DCSupplemental.
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