Q&A: A new metric to improve 5-year species status reviews

Nonprofits and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service collaborate to build better conservation plans

Five-year reviews—one of the main tools that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) uses to track the conservation status of imperiled species listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA)—indicate whether a species has recovered, diminished or remained the same.

“A five-year review utilizes the best available scientific and commercial data on a species to determine whether its status has changed since the time of its listing or its last status review,” the Service states.

The results of these reviews affect the future of species—they can ultimately determine whether to downlist a species from endangered to threatened, elevate a species’ status to endangered or remove species from the ESA entirely. They can also determine whether a species or population has been extirpated or gone extinct. Through this process, biologists provide analyses and recommendations about how the status of species could change.

Courtesy of Olivia Davis

However, five-year reviews aren’t perfect. The five-year time period may not be long enough to catch quick changes in species numbers, for example. And they may not very well capture the nuances of how a species might be increasing in numbers in one area while disappearing in another.

As a result, Olivia Davis, a postdoctoral fellow in biology education at Arizona State University (ASU), and her co-authors worked with USFWS biologists and nonprofits to see if there were ways that these five-year reviews might be improved without adding too much extra work for the reviewers. In our latest Q&A, we spoke with Davis about the results of her paper on this topic, which was part of her PhD thesis at ASU, published in Conservation Science and Practice.

Why did you want to look at five-year reviews during your PhD?

While working with a small nonprofit collaborator called the Environmental Policy Innovation Center (EPIC), there had been a lot of talk about monitoring endangered species recovery progress and how that could be done better. One of our collaborators thought that having a metric—or some kind of way to evaluate recovery progress of species alongside the federal processes that they already had in place—could be helpful.

We worked with other nonprofits like the Defenders of Wildlife and the Illinois Natural History Survey, as well as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, directly. Our collaborator with EPIC had developed the plan for this metric. Basically, it was like a scorecard on an Excel spreadsheet. We went through each species and marked whether they were declining or improving in certain areas. The goal was to get a snapshot of the recovery process to see how species were doing and where we could focus recovery efforts once five-year reviews were published.

What metric did you and your colleagues come up with?

It was based on another paper Ya-Wei Li, who was on my committee, and his colleagues had worked on. Basically, they wanted to look at the 3Rs, which is a concept in biology by Shafer and Stein. The 3Rs—resiliency, redundancy and representation—are a way to look at how a species was doing biologically.

Resiliency, which is the first “R,” relates to how a species can withstand stochastic fluctuations or random changes like ebbs and flows. Redundancy relates to whether a species can withstand a catastrophic event, whether that’s related to climate change, a hurricane or something else. Representation looks at how it’s able to adapt to changing environmental conditions. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided that they liked this as a framework to encapsulate the ability of a species to adapt to external stressors and changes.

We wanted to see the current and projected status of the species. With that knowledge, the USFWS could decide management objectives to implement. Then, we examined if there were already conservation measures being implemented and at what scale. We also looked at the threats facing the species. How were the threats facing the species? Were they getting worse? Were they getting better?

How is this different from the way that USFWS already does their reviews?

Currently, five-year reviews determine whether the species’ status changed since it was listed—it just gives us an overall outcome. When we were designing this metric, we decided that something more helpful for practitioners might be targeted at what exactly was getting better or worse for a species, so we could know where to focus conservation efforts.  

Most of the time, if a species has a five-year review and the status hasn’t changed, but maybe the conservation efforts are being implemented but not on a wide enough scale, then the practitioners could go in and upscale the interventions.

Or, for example, if they noticed that threats are getting worse—in particular, human development—the conservationists could target development as a priority in their management plans. The main focus was instead of just getting this overall “this species is still endangered” outcome, it would allow U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service practitioners more agency and information to know how to act going forward to make things better for the species and what areas to do that in with information they were already collecting.

Do you think this will improve the way that wildlife species are conserved?

We really struggle in conservation, especially on the governmental side of things in terms of resource availability. It’s just such a limited bandwidth and limited resources to get things done. We need to be as efficient as possible in using the time and resources of our practitioners, which often isn’t as much as we would like to have.

This process will benefit practitioners by pulling out specific information that they will be able to act on more directly. They will know where they may need to increase conservation efforts and where they might be able to afford pulling back a little.

A metric like this does pull out more nuanced information about species recovery. That was the big takeaway. Some of this can work, and it can be done efficiently without much extra effort. And we’ll get a bigger snapshot of how a species is doing instead of just “It’s still the same; it’s still not doing well.” Now we know how they’re not doing well and what we can do about it.

Header Image: New metrics could help the outcome of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s five-year review plans for species. Credit: Emma