"Private landowners' responses suggested that the current regulatory approach to rare species conservation is insufficient to protect the Preble's mouse," say Amara Brook, Michaela Zint and Raymond De Young of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in the December issue of Conservation Biology.
More than 90% of federally listed species live at least partly on nonfederal land and as many as half live entirely on nonfederal land, much of which is private. Anecdotal evidence suggests that listing endangered species may not help protect them on private property because landowners may wreck their habitat to avoid land-use restrictions. This is the first study to see if this is true.
Brook and her colleagues surveyed 379 landowners to find out how they responded to the 1998 threatened listing of the Preble's jumping mouse, which lives in riparian areas in parts of Colorado and Wyoming. Much of the mouse's known habitat is on private land.
While some landowners worked to help the listed mouse, others worked to discourage it from living on their property. The survey showed that a quarter of the land in the study had been managed to improve the mouse's habitat, but another quarter had been managed to keep the mouse from living there. Landowners were more likely to have improved the mouse's habitat if they valued nature or had gotten information from conservation organizations. Landowners were more likely to have destroyed the mouse's habitat if they depended economically on agriculture, or thought that landowners should not be responsible for species conservation.
The survey a
'"/>
Contact: Amara Brook
abrook@umich.edu
734-649-1164
Society for Conservation Biology
24-Nov-2003