Improving U.S. Endangered Species Act recovery plans: Key findings and recommendations of the SCB recovery plan project

To promote more effective recovery planning for species listed under the U. S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), the Society for Conservation Biology sponsored a systematic review of a large sample of ESA recovery plans. The review was conducted in collaboration with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, and 19 universities. We describe the genesis of the project and the development of the resulting database of information on ESA recovery plans. The project's primary goals were to characterize the content and attributes of recovery plans; to identify important differences, patterns, and trends among plans; and to use these results to develop recommendations for the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service for improving recovery plans. We review key findings from published analyses of the project database and offer prioritized recommendations for improving recovery-plan development and implementation. First, the use of science in recovery-plan development and implementation could be improved by making threats a primary focus of plans, specifying adequate monitoring tasks for species status and recovery tasks, and ensuring that species trend data are current, quantitative, and documented. Second, recovery-plan structure and development could be enhanced by keeping authorship teams small yet diverse, making existing administrative designations more biologically relevant, improving and standardizing the revision process, and reevaluating the use of multispecies plans. Third, agency resources and personnel could be better utilized by developing new recovery plan guidelines, assigning personnel explicit responsibility for overseeing plan implementation, expanding personnel training, and tracking expenditures in recovery programs. And fourth, several generic failings in the field of conservation biology could be addressed by reducing taxonomic bias and by collecting and fully integrating key biological information into recovery plans. The recovery-plan project offers a model of how professional societies, universities, and government agencies can work together beneficially to address key issues in conservation biology.