The United States' Endangered Species Act (ESA) is the world's foremost law for protecting species at risk of extinction; however, species must first be listed as threatened or endangered before receiving protection under the Act. We used an information theoretic approach to assess whether listing budget, policy phase (which was correlated with presidential administration), or both factors were associated with the number of species listed annually between 1983 and 2014. Annual listing rates were positively affected by larger listing budgets; policy phase also had a significant impact on annual listing rates after accounting for the effects of budget. However, the listing process for any one species spans multiple years, thus we also evaluated how taxonomic affiliation, the initiating organization, and lawsuits affected the amount of time 1338 listed species spent in review between 1973 and 2014. Species waited a median of 12.1 years to receive protection, with plants and invertebrates experiencing longer wait times than vertebrates. These process times exceed ESA deadlines, which are two years when initiated from a third party; this may perpetuate population declines and hinder recovery efforts. We observed that at the time of a lawsuit filling for either a proposed or final rule, species had waited, respectively, 4.19 and 0.70 years longer than species for which no lawsuits were filed, indicating lawsuits targeted species that experienced longer delays. We discuss how changes in ESA implementation over time interacted to produce high variability and often long wait times in the listing process. Our results indicated a positive role for both citizen petitions and budget increases to advance the listing process, thus hastening biodiversity protection.
Puckett_etal_BioCon2016-TotalProcessTimeData
Data file with the following columns: Name (species name), Init_Prop (number of days between initiation and proposed listing date), Prop_List (number of days between a proposed and final listing), Init_List (number of days between initiation and a final listing), Initiator (which group filed the species initiation), SppGroup (taxon as listed in FWS TESS database), PropSuitAfter10 (Y- yes, N- no; Y indicates the species had a lawsuit during the initiation to proposal phase), ListSuit (Y- yes, N- no; Y indicates the species had a lawsuit during the proposed to final listing phase), and SppCode (FWS TESS database code for each species).
Puckett_etal_BioCon2016-Annual_List
Data set for the Annualized Listing Rate analysis. Data columns include: Year and Year_C, Init (number of species initiated in that year), Lst (number of species listed in that year), AdminList (number of species listed, shifted from a yearly start date of Jan 1 to Jan 20 due to presidential administrative cycles), L_Budget (US Fish & Wildlife annual listing budget in millions of $ adjusted for inflation to the value in 2014), Candidates (the number of candidate species for that year), Admin (the presidential administration including: RR: Ronald Reagan; GHB: George H W Bush; BC: William (Bill) Clinton; GWB: George W Bush; BO: Barack Obama); Phase (the policy phase as described in the text).
Puckett_etal_BioCon2016-PropSuit
Data file for length of time for species where lawsuits were filed within the initiation to proposal phase of listing. Columns include: SppCode (US FWS TESS database species code), Init_PetSuit (number of days between initiation and lawsuit), PetSuit_Prop (number of days between lawsuit and proposed ruling).
Puckett_etal_BioCon2016-ListSuit
Data file for length of time for species where lawsuits were filed within the proposal to final rule phase of listing. Columns include: SppCode (US FWS TESS database species code), Prop_Suit (number of days between proposed rule and lawsuit), Suit_List (number of days between lawsuit and final listing rule).
Puckett_etal_BioCon2016-Rcode
R code for the annualized listing rates, and process time analyses (initiation to proposed, proposed to listing, initiation to listing)