ETWP; Review of Plant and Animal Species That Are Candidates or Proposed for Listing as Endangered or Threatened,Annual Notice of Findings on Recycled Petitions, and Annual Description of Progress on Listing Actions; Proposed Rule

In this notice of review, 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 fewer restrictions on activities 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 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 in conserving candidate species. We announce the availability of listing priority assignment forms for candidate species. These documents describe the status and threats that we evaluated in order to assign a listing priority number to each species. We also announce our findings on recycled petitions and describe our progress in revising the Lists of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants during the period January 8, 2001, to October 17, 2001.