conservation

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, has introduced a bill in Congress to amend the Antiquities Act, which grants U.S. presidents the right to create national monuments. Last month, President Obama designated 1.35 million acres under the act in Utah and another 300,000 acres in Nevada, bringing his total to nearly 538 million acres, more than any other president.

Half of the 88 projects selected to receive $225 million in funding for 2017 through the Regional Conservation Partnership Program focus on drought and water quality, says USDA. Private, local and state sources will provide up to $500 million matching funds for the program, which stimulates voluntary soil and water conservation on private land across a landscape.

More than 900 people packed a Modesto hearing, "most of them determined to stop the state's plan" to roughly double the flow on the lower Stanislaus, Tuolumne and Merced rivers from February to June each year, says the Modesto Bee. "Farmers and wataer managers said the plan would put people out of work while doing little for fish."

With enrollment in the land-idling Conservation Reserve nearing its statutory limit of 24 million acres, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced revisions in the program to protect water quality and to benefit wildlife, pollinators and wetlands. Under one of the changes, USDA will pay up to 90 percent of the cost of environmentally beneficial practices, such as bioreactors and saturated buffers that clean up run-off from drainage lines running beneath cropland.

In California, fishermen and conservationists are putting pressure on fisheries managers to re-open the U.S. swordfish catch, which had been heavily restricted to protect endangered species frequently caught in gill nets, says the San Diego Tribune.

“Worldwide populations of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles have plunged by almost 60 percent since 1970 as human activities overwhelm the environment,” says Reuters, based on the 2016 Living Planet Report from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

California is cracking down on illegal fishing in marine protected areas (MPAs) with a new ticketing system, says the LA Times. Previously, fishing in an MPA was considered a misdemeanor and subject to a large fine, which made authorities hesitant to approach someone who may not have even realized they were fishing in an off-limits zone. Now, game wardens hand out tickets worth a few hundred dollars that are payable in local traffic court, says the Times.

Peter Glieck, a founder of the think tank Pacific Institute, is blunt: California leaders made "a big mistake" earlier this year when they removed a requirement to cut water use by 25 percent, says the New York Times. Conservation during June, July and August was lower than during the summer of 2015 and the state is in the fifth year of drought.

A variety of USDA programs will be tapped to provide $328 million in technical and financial assistance to improve water quality and restore coastal ecosystems over three years on agricultural land in the Gulf of Mexico area, said USDA. The strategy calls for conservation improvements on 3.2 million acres of high-priority land in 200 counties and parishes.

The rampant destruction of rainforest by the Indonesian palm-oil industry is leaving villagers with few options but to poach species like the Helmeted Hornbill to extinction, says Jocelyn Zuckerman in FERN’s latest story, published with Audubon Magazine.

Humans have destroyed a tenth of the world’s remaining wilderness — an area the size of two Alaskas — in the last 25 years, says a study, "Catastrophic Declines in Wilderness Areas Undermine Global Environment Targets," out in Current Biology.

Some 45 projects across the country will share $27 million in Conservation Innovation grants to reduce farm runoff, improve water quality and preserve farmland, announced the USDA. Recipients range from the City of Chicago to public universities and the National Corn Growers Association.

Fifteen years after an agreement by Florida and federal officials to revive the Everglades, "billions of dollars have been spent but not much marsh has recovered," says the Miami Herald. "But a review of the key decision points by Florida policymakers over the last two decades shows that one key player in the fate of the Everglades has grown healthier and stronger: Big Sugar."

Thirty Hawaiian lawmakers wrote President Obama urging him not to expand the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument by 8 percent, as conservationists have proposed, says Civil Beat.

Baby fish prefer plastic particles to the zooplankton that makes up their natural diet, according to a study published in the journal Science. The researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden "found that the larval fish that were exposed to microplastic particles displayed a shift in behavior and stunted growth," reports The Christian Science Monitor in an article on the study.

With less than 1 percent of North American oceans under protection, the continent is falling far behind international targets to conserve ocean ecosystems, says a report out by NGOs in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.

The Justice Department has dropped a court fight over the lesser prairie chicken, a step applauded by Western congressmen but that also prompted criticism about whether the battle is really over, reports McClatchy. The Interior Department listed the bird as a threatened species in 2014, but a federal judge in Texas ruled that the government failed to follow its own rules in making the determination.

Some 1.9 million acres of grasslands in the Great Plains were converted to cropland in 2022, said the World Wildlife Fund on Thursday in its annual Plowprint report. “While this figure’s significance cannot be downplayed, it marks an improvement from the previous 10-year average of 2.6 million acres annually,” said the group.