Wolverines proposed as endangered in lower 48

Following a U.S. district court decision earlier this year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has reopened the public comment period on a proposal to list wolverines in the lower 48 states under the Endangered Species Act.

The 30-day public comment period ends Nov. 17 and comes after Judge Dana L. Christensen’s April 4 order requiring the wildlife agency to move forward with a review of whether the species warrants federal protections.

“What we will begin now is a species review,” Serena Baker, a spokeswoman for the Fish and Wildlife Service, said Tuesday. “We’re expecting some new data to come in on climate change in the coming months, so we’re looking forward to that guiding our decisions.”

That new modeling will come from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Baker said it will be paired with a review of available biological information from a panel of scientists before heading to agency leadership for a decision.

She added that she expects the public will inform the rule-making process with new scientific and commercial information that has become available since the last public comment period was held in 2014.

The Fish and Wildlife Service originally proposed a rule to list wolverines as “threatened” under federal law in 2013, but concluded the following year that existing information was insufficient to enact the federal protection.

A “threatened” designation means the population is likely to become endangered within the foreseeable future if no actions are taken to protect it. The proposal was spurred by concerns that the wolverine’s available habitat — currently limited in the lower 48 to alpine environments in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Washington and Oregon — would continue to shrink with the onset of global climate change.

Members of the weasel family, wolverines historically occupied a range extending into the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California and the Southern Rocky Mountains of Colorado. While individual animals have been documented returning to those areas, the agency does not believe they have established breeding populations.

Climate change models forecasting a progressive loss of spring snow across the wolverines’ range prompted the initial proposal, but the federal agency ultimately opted to withdraw the proposal after an analysis of available science “found that climate change models are unable to reliably predict snowfall amounts and snow-cover persistence in wolverine denning locations,” the agency wrote in 2014.

Several environmental groups challenged the agency’s withdrawal of the proposal, and Christensen ultimately sided with the plaintiffs, ordering the Fish and Wildlife Service to revisit the proposed rule.

The Fish and Wildlife Service had also considered a separate rule alongside the listing proposal, which would have established a “nonessential experimental population” of wolverines in Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico. That proposal was also shelved by the agency in 2014, and Baker said it is not being reconsidered at this time.

“We’re really waiting on the science to show us which direction is best to go before we revisit those,” she said.

The agency expects to release its scientific assessment of wolverine populations in the continental U.S. by October 2017, with a final decision the following year.

The Fish and Wildlife Service is accepting public comments through Nov. 17.

To comment online or obtain copies of the proposed rule and supporting documents, visit www.fws.gov/mountain-prairie/es/wolverine.php or visit www.regulations.gov and search for Docket No. FWS-R6-ES-2012-0107.