Black-tailed Deer - Controversy Over Habitat Management

Controversy Over Habitat Management

In Southeast Alaska, the Sitka black-tailed deer is the primary prey of the Alexander Archipelago wolf (Canis lupus ligoni), which is endemic to the region and rare. In the mid-1990s, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service evaluated a petition to list this wolf species as threatened, and decided a listing was not warranted in August 1997, largely on the basis of provisions the Forest Service had included to protect the viability of the wolf species in its Forest Plan for the Tongass National Forest, adopted three months earlier. The Tongass NF is important in wolf conservation because it includes about 80% of the region's land area. The protections for the wolf included a standard and guideline intended to retain, in the face of logging losses, enough habitat carrying capacity for deer in winter to assure the viability of the Alexander Archipelago wolf and an adequate supply of deer for hunters. The needed carrying capacity was originally specified as 13 deer per square mile, but was corrected in 2000 to 18. Use of a deer model is specified for determining carrying capacity, and is the only tool available for the purpose.

However, the Forest Service's implementation of the deer provision in the Tongass wolf standard and guideline has been controversial for many years, and led to a lawsuit by Greenpeace and Cascadia Wildlands in 2008, over four logging projects. The dataset the Forest Service was using in the deer model was known through the agency's own study, done in 2000, was alleged to generally overestimate the carrying capacity for deer. The study showed the data set, called Vol-Strata, is not correlated to habitat quality, which generally causes the carrying capacity for deer to be overestimated and logging impacts to be underestimated, Also, a conversion factor, known as the "deer multiplier" (used in calculating carrying capacity) was incorrectly applied, causing — by itself – a 30% overestimation of carrying capacity and corresponding underestimation of impacts. The combined effect of the two errors is variable because Vol-Strata is not correlated to habitat quality. It is, for the Traitors Cove Timber Sales project the plaintiffs said in 2011 oral arguments before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the difference between a claimed 21 deer per square mile in the project EIS, and 9.5 deer per square mile (about half of the Forest Plan's requirement) according to unpublished corrections made by the agency in 2008.

A ruling was issued in favor of plaintiffs on August 2, 2011 by the 9th Circuit, remanding the four timber sale decisions and giving guidance for what is necessary during reanalysis of impacts to deer. The ruling says in part:

"We do not think that USFS has adequately explained its decision to approve the four logging projects in the Tongass. ... USFS has failed to explain how it ended up with a table that identifies 100 deer per square mile as a maximum carrying capacity, but allows 130 deer per square mile as a potential carrying capacity. 'The agency is obligated to articulate a rational connection between the facts found and the choices made,' which the agency has not done here. Pac. Coast Fed’n of Fisherman’s Ass’ns v. U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, 426 F.3d 1082, 1091 (9th Cir. 2005)..."

"We have similar questions about USFS’s use of VolStrata data, which identifies total timber volume and not forest structure, to approve the projects, where forest structure—and not total timber volume—is relevant to the habitability of a piece of land. USFS itself has recognized the limitations in the VolStrata data. ... Because we must remand to the agency to re-examine its Deer Model, we need not decide whether the use of the VolStrata data was arbitrary and capricious. We anticipate that, in reviewing the proposed projects, USFS will use the best available data ..."

In a statement to the press, a spokesman for the plaintiffs said the errors in this lawsuit apply to every significant Tongass timber sale decision between 1996 and 2008, before the Forest Service corrected errors in the deer model when the agency issued its revised Tongass Forest Plan in 2008. But he said despite those corrections, the agency still fails to address cumulative impacts to deer, especially on Prince of Wales Island, as is being challenged in the Logjam timber sale lawsuit, by ignoring substantial logging on nonfederal lands.