Review of Species That Are Candidates or Proposed for Listing as Endangered or Threatened; Annual Notice of Findings on Resubmitted Petitions; Annual Description of Progress on Listing Actions

In this 2003 Candidate Notice of Review (CNOR), we, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service), present an updated list of plant and animal species native to the United States that we regard as candidates or have proposed for addition to the Lists of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, as amended. Identification of candidate species can assist environmental planning efforts by providing advance notice of potential listings, allowing resource managers to alleviate threats and thereby possibly remove the need to list species as endangered or threatened. Even if we subsequently list a candidate species, the early notice provided here could result in more options for species management and recovery by prompting candidate conservation measures to alleviate threats to the species. We request additional status information that may be available for the identified candidate species and information on additional species that we should include as candidates in future updates of this list. We will consider this information in preparing listing documents and future revisions to the notice of review. This information will help us in monitoring changes in the status of candidate species and also in conserving candidate species. As part of the CNOR, we announce the availability of Candidate and Listing Priority Assignment Forms (candidate forms) for each candidate species. The CNOR and the candidate forms constitute our findings as to the status and threats that we evaluated in order to assign a listing priority number to each species. This includes our findings on resubmitted petitions and describes our progress in revising the Lists of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants during the period June 13, 2002 through April 19, 2004.