A review of protocols for selecting species at risk in the context of US Forest Service viability assessments

In December 2000, the USDA Forest Service (USFS) commissioned a review of their process for conducting viability assessments under the National Forest Management Act (NFMA). The objectives of the USFS review were to establish the scientific basis for geographic and temporal scales used in the assessment of viability, to identify and improve approaches that could be used to assess species viability within the context of NFMA, and to describe the strengths and limitations of the approaches used in the viability assessment process. In this paper, we present one aspect of this overall review: methods available and in use for selection of species at risk for the viability assessment process. A representative group of methods includes threatened and endangered species protocols such as the IUCN protocol, the Heritage ranks, the method devised by Millsap et al. (1990) to identify threatened and endangered species in Florida, as well as protocols for narrower taxonomic and geographic ranges. We provide a description of each of the nine protocols reviewed and compare them in terms of their taxonomic and geographic range. biological attributes, consideration of threats and population trends, data requirements, reliability and robustness, transparency and ability to deal With Uncertainty. We found that all threatened and endangered species protocols are useful for classifying species at risk, however, those that explicitly include current and future threats are of most use in determining which species will be adversely affected by proposed management actions. We recommend that Heritage ranks be used to identify an initial set of candidate species for assessment of viability considerations, with further refinement and supplementation based on species distributions, relative to the scale of the planning area. (C) 2004 Published by Elsevier SAS.