The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is compiling scientific information on gray wolf recovery that will form the basis for a conservation assessment of the endangered Mexican wolf. A draft of the conservation assessment will be available for public comment and peer review in the fall.
The conservation assessment will provide an up-to-date scientific foundation for the program. It will be a unique document developed in response to the distinctive needs of the Mexican wolf recovery program.
The conservation assessment will contain the historical and political history of the Mexican wolf, an overview of species biology and ecology as well as an overview of the current reintroduction project. It will include a discussion on three key scientific concepts fundamental to the recovery of the gray wolf -- population resiliency, population redundancy, and genetic representation. Population resiliency means ensuring that populations are large enough numerically and geographically to persist in the foreseeable future. Population redundancy is the need to have more than one population to lessen the species vulnerability. Genetic representation ensures that genetic diversity is maintained. There will be a discussion of the range of application with which these three concepts could be applied.
Information will come from several sources including published peer-reviewed literature, previous reviews of the Mexican wolf reintroduction project, information from the Great Lakes and Northern Rockies gray wolf recovery programs, and information compiled for a recent but incomplete revision of the 1982 Mexican Wolf Recovery Plan. A technical team of biologists had begun revising the Plan in 2003, but their work was put on hold in 2005 due to litigation contesting the Services decision to reclassify the gray wolf into three geographical populations.
"The conservation assessment will capture the scientific concepts considered by the biologists as they discussed recovery of the Mexican wolf," said Benjamin N. Tuggle, Ph.D., the Services Southwest Regional Director. "The assessment will provide some vision for the future based upon the work the recovery team had done to date and what our biologists have learned since reintroduction began in 1998. It will not contain specific recovery criteria and actions which will have to be developed in a formal recovery planning process."
The conservation assessment is not related to the Services planned modification to its rule that established the Mexican wolf reintroduction project in central Arizona and New Mexico. The rule modification is specific to the current reintroduction effort, while the conservation assessment will broadly address the long-term conservation needs for the Mexican wolf.
The assessment will be developed in coordination with the Services State, Federal, and Tribal partners in Mexican wolf reintroduction.
