Background Information:
Designation of critical habitat is one of the four measures required under the federal Endangered Species Act to help facilitate species recovery, and highlights the fact that species cannot be preserved without safeguarding their habitat. Also required are reviews of federal actions to ensure that they don’t jeopardize species recovery or critical habitat.  Identification of critical habitat within an area does not automatically preempt development, but provides an additional mechanism to gauge potential project impacts. Critical habitat for the manatee was designated in 1976, and has not been revisited since, even though the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service stated in the federal recovery plan for the Florida manatee (2001) that new information learned about the manatee warranted reassessment of critical habitat. 

The Endangered Species Act requires that critical habitat be defined to the maximum extent prudent and determinable, and provides for consideration of economic and other impacts. The deficiency of the manatee’s current critical habitat designation is highlighted by the Orange River in Lee County, Florida.  The Orange River connects the Caloosahatchee River with the FPL Tice power plant, which serves as a primary warm water refuge for manatees during winter months. Although the Orange River serves as a travel corridor, provides shelter, and contains a primary thermal refuge, this river is not currently designated as manatee critical habitat. A critical habitat designation for the Orange River may have helped block Leeward, LLC from receiving permits to build a 128-slip marina on the Orange River, where hundreds of manatees rest during winter months. 

In the 32 years that have passed since manatee critical habitat was first designated, much has been learned about manatees and how they require certain habitat elements for survival.  Such elements, termed constituent elements, are physical and biological features essential to species conservation, including feeding sites, travel corridors, warm water, and shelter. No such elements are listed for manatees, because the requirement for their inclusion came two years after designation of manatee critical habitat. Because critical habitat management is based on protection of constituent elements, this omission seriously limits the ability to determine when a federal action will adversely modify critical habitat (such as the issuance of a permit for a large docking facility).

The Critical Habitat Petition submitted to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service by the Wildlife Advocacy Project, Save the Manatee Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, and Defenders of Wildlife on December 19, 2008, seeks to revise the manatee’s federal critical habitat designations, based on the best available manatee science, and identifies constituent elements of manatee habitat throughout Florida. In a state where 12.3 million individuals currently reside in coastal counties and a total of 26 million coastal residents are expected by 2060, identification and protection of manatee critical habitat represent an important component in the effort to recover this species.

Return to the Conservation Groups Petition Feds press release.