Endangered: The Siskiyou Mountains and Scott Bar Salamanders

by Stephanie Ernst · 2009-05-20 14:28:00 UTC
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New feature here on the Animal Rights blog at Change.org: short, once- or twice-weekly profiles of various endangered or threatened animals.

First up are the Scott Bar and Siskiyou Mountains salamanders. The Center for Biological Diversity explains that the salamanders have small home ranges on the Oregon-California border, and "their special habitat requirements make them highly sensitive to logging, and studies prove that cutting always precipitates their decline or disappearance":

The Siskiyou Mountains salamander was once protected under the Survey and Manage Program, a provision of the Northwest Forest Plan established for unprotected species dependent on old-growth forests. The program employed a “look-before-you-leap” strategy that required the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to survey for old-growth species and create logging buffers around where the species were found. But in 2004, the Bush administration eliminated the program, leaving the Siskiyou Mountains and Scott Bar salamanders, among hundreds of other species, without protection. Along with our allies, the Center filed a petition to protect these two salamanders under the Endangered Species Act in 2004. After several lawsuits, in 2007 the Service announced that listing for the salamanders may be warranted— but the next year declared that neither species merited listing.

The loss or decline of salamanders from forest ecosystems has important consequences up and down the food chain. Salamanders play a key role in forest nutrient flow, regulating the abundance of soil invertebrates that are responsible for the breakdown of plant detritus. Salamanders’ loss from forested stands is indicative of changes that will likely affect a broad array of species.

Read more here and here. For more on the biologically rich Klamath-Siskiyou region, where animals' habitat is in danger from logging and other human activities, see this site.

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Photo courtesy Eugene Weir, via EPIC

Stephanie Ernst wrote the original Animal Rights blog at Change.org until December 2009. She can now be found at Animal Rights & AntiOppression.
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