February 16, 2006. On behalf of the Utah
Environmental Congress and the High Uintas Preservation Council, WildLaw
challenged the Ashley National Forest's adopting a forest plan amendment that
reduced the number of Management Indicator Species (MIS) on the Forest from 12
to two. MIS are important, because monitoring of MIS populations is how the
agency knows whether or not its management actions help or harm wildlife and
ecosystem health. Judge Tena Campbell focused her analysis on the Forest Plan
Amendment issue where the Ashley decided to retain only Northern Goshawk and
Colorado Cutthroat Trout as MIS when the Forest previously had 12 MIS species.
We won primarily because of the small number of MIS retained on the Forest. This
is based on the holding from the UEC II case, 421 F. 3d 1105 (10th Cir. 2005).
In UEC II, another WildLaw victory, the Tenth Circuit had held previously that
"selecting only one or two (or a few) acceptable MIS actually present in a
project area cannot satisfy the overall monitoring obligations" of Forest
Service regulations. For this reason only having two MIS for the whole Forest is
insufficient since its impossible to fulfill their monitoring obligations by
even having those two 2 MIS in the project area. Instead of MIS, the agency
proposed unspecified "habitat monitoring." The court rejected habitat
monitoring based on other Tenth Circuit precedent. UEC I, 372 F. 3d 1219, 1226
(10th Cir. 2004)(also another WildLaw victory). The court reversed the Forest's
decision and directed them to select more MIS.
All over the nation, National Forests have been
changing their management plans to reduce the number of MIS they need to monitor
to ridiculously low and useless numbers. As far as we know, this is the first
case in the country to hold that illegal. Congratulations to our Staff Attorney
Joel Ban, who argued the case.
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