Trump administration is taking steps to remove a threatened lynx from the endangered-species list

Source: Washington Post

Trump administration is taking steps to remove a threatened lynx from the endangered-species list

By Darryl Fears January 11 at 7:52 PM

The Trump administration announced Thursday that it’s moving to strike the Canada lynx from the endangered-species list, despite a 2016 assessment concluding the species will die out in its northern range by the end of the century without federal protection.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had initially said it was “very unlikely” that resident lynx populations would survive until 2100 “in all of the geographic units that currently support them.” The assessment in the waning weeks of the Obama administration had warned that “resiliency will be substantially diminished because of reduced population sizes and distributions.”

In October, the Trump administration came to a somewhat different conclusion. It expressed confidence the animals would survive through 2050 — though officials said they could not be certain of the lynx’s fate in its sprawling range across Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Colorado, Idaho and Washington.

“Resident lynx populations,” the administration said, “are very likely to persist in (the territories) that currently support them in the near-term,” which the 2017 document identified as seven years away.

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/animalia/wp/2018/01/11/trump-administration-is-taking-steps-to-remove-a-threatened-lynx-from-the-endangered-species-list/