‘Hot Spot’ Focus Urged in Efforts to Save Species

Endangered species are so concentrated in Southern California and a few other hot spots that conservation efforts should be targeted there to help stem the country’s loss of biodiversity, researchers will report today.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, in an article that accompanied the report in the journal Science, said the new data will help revise federal policies to save animals and plants at risk of extinction. Congress is gearing up to extend--and possibly to overhaul--the 24-year-old Endangered Species Act.

Because a multitude of species could be protected if even small amounts of lands were preserved, Babbitt and his science advisor H. Ronald Pulliam wrote, the new work should help “maximize the protection of species at the least cost and inconvenience to the public.”

The Princeton biologists who studied the nation’s 924 endangered and threatened species concluded that government efforts would be more efficient if they targeted the relatively small number of counties where a vast diversity of species overlaps with intense pressures from urbanization and agriculture.

The hot spots include Hawaii, Florida and southern Appalachia as well as much of Southern California, the researchers found.

“If conservation efforts and funds can be expanded in a few key areas, it should be possible to conserve endangered species with great efficiency,” the researchers, led by Princeton’s Andrew Dobson, wrote.

Scientists have called loss of biodiversity--the richness of living organisms--one of the world’s most pressing environmental problems. In the past two centuries, extinction of birds and mammals has swelled to a pace three times greater than during the two centuries before, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

The Endangered Species Act has been criticized as inefficient because many creatures and their habitats continue to decline even after they are granted federal protection. At the same time, landowners, developers, timber companies and farmers, especially in the West, have lambasted the law as inflexible and economically destructive, particularly when it comes to restricting use of private property.

Using an electronic mapping system, the researchers from Princeton’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology found that endangered birds are clustered in just 19 of the nation’s more than 3,000 counties--areas that encompass 1.59% of the nation’s total land mass. Endangered mammals are found in just 29 counties.

The Princeton researchers also discovered that agriculture is the main economic activity associated with severe imperilment of mammals, plants, birds and reptiles, and that tailoring projects to protect birds is the best way to save a multitude of species sharing an ecosystem.

Dennis Murphy, director of Stanford University’s Center for Conservation Biology, said the highlighting of Southern California, Hawaii, Florida and Appalachia reinforces the need for Congress and the Clinton administration to find practical ways to preserve habitat on valuable private lands.

“All four locations are very rich with private property holdings, and very poor in public land holdings,” he said. “This [study] underscores the fact that the real challenge of conserving endangered species is not one that affects all 50 states, but in these four places resolving conflicts on private property is very real.”

Designation as a hot spot comes as little surprise in California, where federal or state authorities have declared more than 300 animals and plants endangered or threatened.

Southern California’s Mediterranean climate and vast variety of terrain creates small pockets of unique habitats, such as coastal sage scrub and vernal pools, that are brimming with life forms that exist nowhere else. California is the most biologically diverse state, and that diversity of nature often comes into conflict with its population growth, agriculture and water diversion.

“The hot spots are where you get a unique intersection of high impact and richness of species with narrow distributions. The classic location for that is Southern California--where you have a hell of a lot of people and a lot of narrowly developed species,” Murphy said.

Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco and Santa Cruz counties were singled out in the report as prime areas of potential extinction for multiple species in two or three taxonomic groups, such as birds and mammals. Two counties in Florida and a county in Georgia also stood out, along with the Hawaiian island counties of Hawaii, Kauai, Oahu and Maui.

Florida’s animals and plants--including the panther, manatee, sea turtles and key deer--are imperiled by development and tourism, especially along the coast, and agricultural expansion.

Hawaii’s array of tropical birds and flowering plants has been crowded out by development as well as nonnative vegetation and animals that have been brought in. Southern Appalachia, especially in Tennessee, has large numbers of endangered mussels and other aquatic invertebrates.

During the last decade, Southern California species granted federal protection have included the gnatcatcher, a songbird that inhabits coastal real estate largely in Orange and San Diego counties, and the Stephens’ kangaroo rat, which lives only in Riverside County grasslands.

The study, while suggesting ways to improve conservation, does little to address the most divisive debate in Congress and the Interior Department: how to go about protecting endangered species on private land.

Some say owners should be reimbursed if the law restricts use of their land, while others say the cost would cripple the program. Still others advocate government purchase of land to create preserves, or tax rebates and incentives.

California farmers and other landowners say that simply targeting conservation efforts on their property will fail unless federal and state laws protecting endangered species are made less punitive.

“It’s not enough for scientists to say, ‘Focus on these key areas,’ if you’re still going to alienate the landowners there,” said Merlin Fagan, director of environmental affairs at the California Farm Bureau. “You have to work out practices that work for me, the grower or rancher, and work for the species too. That’s always been the hard part.”

The concept of targeting specific areas to save clusters of species is already the focus of a Southern California experiment.

For the last five years, developers have teamed up with federal and state officials to create sage scrub preserves on private land for the gnatcatcher and other species, from butterflies to plants. So far, the Irvine Co. in Orange County is the only developer to agree on preserves, while efforts in San Diego County have remained highly contentious.

“The real value of the [Science] paper is in the questions it raises, not necessarily the answers it gives us,” said Murphy, who helped craft the gnatcatcher program. “It does not tell us how we should spend the very few conservation dollars we have.”

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Trouble Spots

Four California counties--Los Angeles, Kings, San Luis Obispo and Contra-Costa--are among those listed as “hot spots” in a nationwide, county-by-county study of endangered species.

California: Arthropods, mammals and birds

Florida: Mammals, reptiles & amphibians

Hawaii: Plants and birds

Mississippi: Reptiles & amphibians

Nevada: Fish

New Mexico: Fish

North Carolina: Mollusks

Texas: Arthropods