[4] Critical Habitat Designated For Bull Trout
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced its final rule that designates nearly 4,000 miles of Northwest streams and more than 100,000 acres of lakes and reservoirs as critical habitat for ESA-listed bull trout populations. The latest designations are in response to a court settlement with environmental groups that established a schedule for developing the critical habitat designations.
According the USFWS, bull trout were originally found in about 60 percent of the Columbia Basin, but now populate less than half of their original waters, and the final rule has significantly reduced that amount of habitat covered from an earlier proposal.
For instance, in 2002 nearly 9,000 stream miles in Idaho's share of the Columbia Basin were proposed as critical habitat, along with 205,000 acres of lakes and reservoirs. The final rule whittled that down to 293 stream miles and 27,296 acres of lakes and reservoirs.
In Washington state, the final rule cut about a thousand stream miles from the 2002 proposal. Oregon now has 911 stream miles designated, out of nearly 4,000 stream miles proposed. Montana ended up with about one-third of the stream miles designated as critical habitat as was proposed in 2002.
One big difference from the earlier proposal is that habitat has been excluded where no bull trout have been seen for the past 20 years. Also excluded from the designations is the river system that provides the backbone for the federal power projects in the Columbia Basin. The USFWS said in a Sept. 23 press release that the agency recognized the $3.3 billion spent on restoring habitat for salmon over the past 20 years has benefited bull trout as well.
The final rule also excluded all reservoirs and pools "behind dams whose primary purpose is for energy production, flood control or water supply for human consumption." The agency decided that disrupting these functions "could compromise human health and safety or result in large economic costs." -B. R.
The following links were mentioned in this story:
Final Critical Habitat for All Bull Trout Poplulations in Lower 48 States, USFWS
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