Vertebrate Information Compiled by the Utah Natural Heritage Program: A Progress Report

The Utah Natural Heritage Program (UNHP) assimilates and synthesizes information concerning rare species for use in land management and species conservation applications. This information is maintained in the UNHP database and includes both species-level information—e.g., assessments of species conservation status from a statewide perspective—and population-level information, which includes GIS coverages for species of high conservational interest. Beginning in 1996 an effort to develop information in the UNHP database for animal species was funded by the Utah Reclamation, Mitigation, and Conservation Commission under authority of the Central Utah Project Completion Act. Initial efforts focused on assigning conservation priority ranks. Several factors—comprising the number and size of populations, the extent of the Utah range, population trends, and threats to population viability—for each vertebrate species occurring in the state were considered in the development of relative conservation priority ranks. Species having the greatest and most immediate conservation needs comprise the UNHP tracking list, which designates species for which data are acquired and managed in the UNHP database. A UNHP report completed during 1997 (UDWR 1997) summarized the UNHP vertebrate tracking list and reviewed literature pertaining to the conservation status of these species. Since 1997, a focus of database development efforts has been the acquisition of population-level data, comprising geospatial attributes of populations and information pertaining to their status and viability, such as observation dates, population estimates, population trends, and habitat condition. Although published literature has been an important source of these data, a large portion of the information in the database is unpublished. Many records have been acquired through queries of museum research collections, notably collections maintained by the University of Utah’s Museum of Natural History and Brigham Young University’s Monte L. Bean Museum. Many other unpublished records in the database have been acquired through collaboration with agency biologists, including those associated with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), U. S. Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. Data acquired within UDWR from the various programs involved in the management of native species comprises the bulk of the unpublished information in the database. Concurrent with the development of population-level data, the UNHP tracking list has been modified as data have been acquired and changes in conservation priorities have become evident. This report summarizes the information contained in the UNHP database for the 132 taxa on the current vertebrate tracking list

Strategic Management Plan for Columbian Sharp-Tailed Grouse 2002

The Columbian Sharp-tailed Grouse (Tympanuchus phasianellus columbianus) is one of seven subspecies of Sharp-tailed Grouse. Historically, Columbian Sharp-tailed Grouse occurred within sagebrush-native bunch grass habitat throughout the intermountain region, extending from British Columbia, Washington, Idaho and Montana south through portions of Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. Sharp-tailed Grouse populations range-wide began declining during 1880-1920 (Bart 2000). By 1936, the range of distribution had been reduced by two-thirds (Hart et al. 1950). Currently, Columbian Sharp-tailed Grouse occur in only 5 % of their historic range-wide distribution and 4% of their distribution in Utah (Bart 2000). Within the United States, the largest remaining populations occur in southeastern Idaho, northern Utah, and northern Colorado. Although Sharp-tailed Grouse were never widely distributed throughout Utah, they were very abundant where they occurred (Figure 1). Since the early 1900s, agricultural developments, over grazing by livestock and big game animals and human population growth significantly reduced the quantity and quality of native grassland and shrub-grassland vegetation types used by Sharp-tailed Grouse. By 1975, isolated populations remained only in east Box Elder, Cache, Morgan, Summit, and Weber Counties in northern Utah. However, implementation of the federal Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) in 1987 benefited Sharp-tailed Grouse substantially and increased their distribution by approximately 400 percent by 2000 (Figure 1). Elimination or reduction in the acreage of CRP would result in population declines

Cache County, Utah Resource Assessment

This resource assessment is designed to gather and display information specific to Cache County, Utah. This report will highlight the natural and social resources present in the county, detail specific concerns, and be used to aid in resource planning and target conservation assistance needs. This document is dynamic and will be updated as additional information is available through a multi-agency partnership effort. The general observations and summaries are listed first, followed by the specific resource inventories

Rare, Imperiled, and Recently Extinct or Extirpated Mollusks of Utah: A Literature Review

About 139 species of mollusks are known to occur, or within historical times to have occurred, in Utah. The number of known Utah mollusks is not fixed and can be expected to continue to change, increasing as new molluscan discoveries are made in Utah and possibly decreasing as taxonomic revisions change our concept of how many valid mollusk species exist. This report represents one of the end products of a review of literature—published journal articles and books as well as unpublished agency reports—dealing with mollusks in Utah. The goals of this review were to determine (1) which species have been documented from the state, (2) extent of knowledge of the status—abundance, distribution, conservational needs, and so forth—of each of the species in Utah, and, thus, (3) which species are of conservational concern in the state. This report summarizes the assembled information pertaining to the last goal, the 79 molluscan species that are of conservational priority—or of conservational interest in the cases of those believed to be extirpated or extinct; it is intended to help guide current management of the molluscan resources of the state as well as to identify gaps in existing knowledge that will need to be filled in order to manage these resources more effectively in the future. Some of the understanding that is important for truly effective management of Utah\u27s mollusks is lacking, especially with regard to our knowledge of threats to and population trends in these species. Threats to various species discussed in this report should be understood, in most cases, as potential threats, often based on educated guesses. Similarly, information pertaining to population trends of mollusks in Utah is largely unavailable from the existing literature. Despite the incompleteness of reported information concerning Utah mollusks, much is known, and this information obtained from the literature provides an valuable base from which to plan future work. Mollusks, as a group, are thought to be among the most endangered of animal groups that occur in North America, but this is a new awareness, and conservational management attention has only recently begun to be directed toward this group. The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources now has management authority for all mollusks in the state and is establishing mechanisms and procedures for the management and protection of the state\u27s molluscan resources

An assessment of oil shale and tar sand development in the state of Utah: Phase 2--policy analysis

reportThe potential development of synthetic fuels in the United States has been characterized by a great variation in preceived economies. The interest has been on an upswing during the decade of the 1970's due to the possibility of synthetic fuels lessening U.S. dependence on foreign oil. However, even during this period, the economic viability of a synthetic fuel industry has never been completely established. There exist major questions still unanswered regarding the technologies, capital costs, and impacts of a synthetic fuel industry. Attempts at removing these uncertainties through experimentation and pilot plant operations have not yet yielded adequate information and data. The result has been that the traditional learning curve effects which accompany most developmental processes have failed to resolve the question of synthetic fuel commercialization viability. The State of Utah contains a vast amount of resources which could be utilized by a synthetic fuel industry. The Uintah Basin of northeastern Utah contains an estimated 321 billion barrels of shale oil. Of this amount, it has been estimated that approximately 50 billion barrels are currently recoverable, an amount equal to nearly twice the proven conventional petroleum reserves in the U.S. Utah also has approximately 93 percent of the U.S. tar sand resource. These deposits are estimated to contain over 25 billion barrels of oil. Thus, Utah is in a position to play a central role should a synthetic fuel industry develop. Such a position is substantiated by the large amount of interest shown by potential developers in the Utah resources

Plant Information Compiled by the Utah Natural Heritage Program: A Progress Report

The Utah Natural Heritage Program (UTHP) was initiated in late summer 1988 and has functioned as an ongoing biological survey of the state with an emphasis on rare or declining species. It serves as a centralized data repository, acquiring range wide information regarding rare plant and animal species for use by land managers as well as for the evaluation of conservation needs. As well as being used by government agencies, data are used in responding to requests for information from non-government organizations and private interests. Data can be used in the assessment of species’ conservation status state-wide and, in coordination with adjoining states, range-wide. The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources developed a plan for a statewide inventory of sensitive species that was approved by the Utah Reclamation Mitigation and Conservation Commission in February 1995. A subsequent cooperative agreement funded, early on, a UTHP report (Stone 1998) that summarized “the distribution and status of rare and endemic plants in Utah.” With it as a guide, funding continued to support the acquisition of data from numerous dynamic sources, i.e., herbarium collections, other-source survey reports, in-house completed surveys, published literature and knowledgeable individuals, and then the entry and incorporation of that data into a database of Element Occurrences, i.e., the habitat occupied by a local population. Notable sources of collection data have been the Stanley L. Welsh Herbarium, Brigham Young University, the Garrett Herbarium, University of Utah, and the Intermountain Herbarium, Utah State University. Having management responsibility for Utah’s rare and endemic species, the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have funded and shared the results of countless plant surveys. These herbaria and Federal management agencies have been and continue to be the primary sources for plant data. The state of Utah is unique in the richness of its endemic and rare flora. Only four states, i.e., California, Florida, Texas, and Oregon, equal or exceed Utah in their numbers of rare plant species (Stone 1998). In the recent edition of A Utah Flora (Welsh et al. 2003) forty-one taxa new to science were named. As these new taxa are evaluated for potential addition to a dynamic list of species of conservation concern, there are others that have gone through the process of addition to Federal Agency sensitive species lists, field data gathering, a status reevaluation and, perhaps, the determination that they are not of conservation concern. These taxa are removed; others, however, remain at various levels of concern on agency sensitive species lists, and there are those few of significant enough conservation concern to be listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act. Summarized here is information on 100 of those plants that remain, i.e., all of Utah’s federally listed and candidate species, species for which data are still being gathered, most of which have Federal Agency status, and species that are newly named and potentially of conservation concern