Section 10 of the Endangered Species Act provides that non-federal entities can obtain Incidental Take Permits to protect them against legal liability if they inadvertently or unintentionally take a protected species while carrying out other activities. To obtain an ITP, applicants must first get a Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) approved, which must set forth measures they are taking to minimize and mitigate their impact on the species. Given the number of threatened and endangered species on non-federal lands, the HCP program offers a potentially strong conservation benefit. However, there are significant data gaps in how the program is functioning. In this talk given at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the National HCP Coalition, Heather Harl and Andrew Carter discuss CCI’s work relevant to the Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) program, and potential usefulness to HCP practitioners and other researchers. We first presented the results of a large-scale analysis of the HCP program as a whole, which involved collecting documents through a Freedom of Information Act for 596 individual plans spanning across FWS regions in the United States. We then provided an overview of our analysis, identify potential gaps and barriers to conservation that we found, and offer suggestions to how the program may be improved generally. Finally, we discussed conservation tools developed by CCI - or under development - that could potentially help with HCP planning and monitoring, including tools designed to track habitat alterations and create geospatial data collaboratively.
