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The Fish and Wildlife Service is more carefully evaluating the species protection plans that other federal agencies have put in place when determining whether to exclude federal lands from critical habitat designations for endangered species, according to Douglas Krofta, chief of the Branch of Listing in the FWS national office.

"It's not a new policy," Krofta said, "we're just doing what we've previously done, but maybe doing it a little more thoroughly."

Though it may be a minor adjustment, when federal lands are evaluated for exclusion from critical habitat designation, millions of acres of potential habitat hang in the balance. While the Endangered Species Act requires that the decision to list a species as endangered be made without taking the economic costs of listing into account, it does allow for economic cost-benefit analysis to inform the designation of critical habitat; land can be excluded if an analysis indicates that the costs of designating the land outweigh its conservation value.

In the past, federal lands have been excluded if the species protection plans already in place are deemed adequate.

But while Krofta warns that such decisions are always made on a case-by-case basis, he said that FWS will begin holding the plans to a higher standard. "If we were going to evaluate an area for exclusion from critical habitat, we need a more thorough evaluation for the habitat," he said. "We need to look closely and have a very strong argument."

The shift comes after a string of court decisions in which exclusions of federal land from critical habitat have been overturned. In 2003, for example, a federal court chided FWS for their 2001 decision to remove 8.9 million acres of proposed critical habitat that was on Forest Service land from the Mexican spotted owl critical habitat designation. After Forest Service land was excluded, 95 percent of all known spotted owls and 80 percent of owl habitat fell outside the critical habitat boundaries and were subject to the threat of logging -- the "very threat that imperiled the species to begin with," according to Noah Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity.

Greenwald is skeptical that species protection plans can protect endangered species as well as critical habitat designations. "It varies by the species, but in general the multiple-use doctrine on federal lands has typically resulted in resource extraction from public lands and in many cases this has led to threats to species," he said.

When evaluating other agencies' species protection plans, Krofta said that a key aspect would be evaluating whether the plan was enforceable and whether the proper mechanisms were in place to enforce it. "We view these arrangements as partnerships, and we want to walk the land with our partners and make sure that they can and will do what they say they will to protect the species," he said.

But according to John Kostyack of the National Wildlife Federation, FWS will have to make more than minor changes if it is to effectively designate critical habitat to protect endangered species. In his 2004 paper, "Unsound Economics: The Bush Administration's New Strategy for Undermining the Endangered Species Act," Kostyack accuses FWS of wrongfully excluding land from critical habitat designations by using economic analysis that exaggerates the cost of designation and undervalues or ignores the benefits of conservation.

Still, Kostyack is encouraged by the policy shift at FWS. "If it happens, it would be a major break with the direction things have been going for a long time," he said.

Greenwald shares Kostyack's sentiments. "The [Endangered Species Act] has been particularly effective on public lands, and so including more public lands in critical habitat would do a lot of good for species who need it," he said. "This administration has come up with as many flimsy reasons as possible to exclude land from critical habitat, and using the fact that habitat falls on public land is one of the flimsiest."

FWS's new approach may already be affecting some decisions. The agency announced on March 5 that it would not exclude Bureau of Land Management land in western Oregon from the critical habitat designation for the marbled murrelet, a Pacific Northwest seabird that nests inland in old-growth forests. FWS expressed concern over possible negative effects of BLM's Western Oregon Plan, which is currently being revised, on the murrelet's habitat (Land Letter, March 6).