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Get your maps to rare
species' homes
New digital maps to show habitats of
protected animals
Published in the Asbury Park Press
08/16/05BY KIRK MOORE
STAFF WRITER
State wildlife experts are expanding a digital map of New Jersey to include
habitat areas for all of the state's animal species, a move toward unifying
wildlife management efforts and tying them more closely to open space and land
use planning.
In recent years, the state Division of Fish and Wildlife's
Landscape Project map effort outlined critical habitats for threatened and
endangered species, such as the Pine Barrens tree frog and northern barred owl.
Documented sightings of those animals and subsequent mapping have been upheld
in the courts as a valid reason for the state to restrict certain kinds of land
development, said Lawrence Niles, chief of the division's endangered species
program.
"We're now in the beginning stages of doing this for game
species," Niles said at a seminar hosted Thursday by the division at its
Assunpink Wildlife Management Area in Upper Freehold.
Endangered species
protection has been a government priority only since the 1970s, compared to New
Jersey's century-old program for managing game animals such as deer and ducks,
which is funded mostly by hunting license fees.
Within the wildlife
bureaucracy, "game and non-game have not always played nice," noted Kim Korth
of the endangered species program. Now, in the face of suburbanization and
habitat loss, even some once-reliable game species like bobwhite quail are in
retreat, and biologists say they need to save their home terrain
too.
Meanwhile, hunters themselves are a dwindling breed in New Jersey,
where annual hunting license purchases and renewals are declining at a rate of
3 to 4 percent a year, according to wildlife division officials. But New Jersey
also has more politically powerful conservation and environmental groups than
other states, and those groups can join with hunting groups to support land and
habitat conservation.
Other states are facing New Jersey-like issues of
open space and suburban development, and "'throughout the country we're trying
to get ahead of the destruction," Niles said. One step is to "erase game and
non-game boundaries" that traditionally divided state wildlife programs, he
said.
The mapping program has focused early on bobwhite quail, and its
remaining New Jersey strongholds in the far northwest and southwest counties.
Quail have been in steep decline since the 1960s and "we suspect the main
reason for this is loss of habitat," biologist Andy Burnett said.
Along
with scientific research into the quails' problems, wildlife officials are
planning to help farmers and other landowners obtain federal farm bill funding
and incentives to preserve grasslands. What's good for quail can also be good
for endangered bird species, such as the grasshopper sparrow, Niles
said.
There's been success before with this in New Jersey, Burnett said.
"The wild turkey was extirpated for about 100 years before we restored
it."
"Every state wildlife agency is doing this," said Martin McHugh,
director of the Division of Fish and Wildlife. "At the end of this, we're going
to have a national conservation strategy for these species."
Kirk Moore: (732) 557-5728 |