Biodiversity—More than Endangered Species

In 2020 the Town of Rhinebeck asked us to review an application submitted by a mining operation for an Incidental Take Permit for the state threatened Blanding’s turtle required by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation prior to construction of a new access road. Here’s a collection of important points made in the report Erik Kiviat submitted to the town, some specific to the application, some overarching.

— Although the Blanding’s turtle is the emergent issue in regulation covering this specific permit, analysis and balancing of concerns in planning projects should not stop with one species, and all parties, in this case the mining company, the regulatory agencies, and the citizens, have a responsibility to work together to optimize understanding, conservation, and management of habitats and species at current and former mining sites, which often support populations of rare species.

— The rest of nature is often dismissed during environmental reviews, but biodiversity is more than Endangered and Threatened species. While surveying the area for Blanding’s turtles, Hudsonia’s scientists found stands of little bluestem that could host a trio of rare butterflies—the cobweb, Leonard’s and swarthy skipper—and the report included reference to prior occurence of spotted turtles, a New York Special Concern species, on the site.

— Erik Kiviat and his colleagues have performed many trapping surveys for the Blanding’s turtle in Dutchess County beginning in 1983. This work led to a standardization of techniques to make surveys comparable. The work at the mining site was conducted in such a way that it is not comparable to other surveys, and it has several other deficiencies, including that the authors are not named and their experience is not included, so it’s not clear they have the ability to locate rare organisms. Apparently, when looking for turtles the team did not scan the wetlands with binoculars, and although ten 24-hour periods is standards practice for trapping, the traps were set for a total of four 24-hour periods, and too few traps were used. Further it was not specified if the bait was replaced, or left for the entire period. There’s more, but you get the picture.

— On the other hand, Erik Kiviat reports that the site is part of a habitat complex of excellent quality for the Blanding’s turtle, with a 10-acre kettle shrub pool, extensive potential nesting habitat around the margins of the crop fields, and in the abandoned mine area. And the site is part of a much larger area recognized as a “Priority Conservation Area” and identified as a potential Critical Environment Area by Rhinebeck’s Conservation Advisory Board.

— The report concludes that in the absence of certain procedures and documentation it cannot be legitimately asserted that the Blanding’s population is small, and the work that would have underpinned the claim that the population is not viable was not done. You can’t answer a long-term demographic question by tracking and observing a few turtles for one or two seasons, and this is a excellent example of a permit-process document falling short, leaving the species of concern at risk of decline or extirpation.