According to a senior biologist at the Fish and Wildlife Service, agency officials knowingly used flawed science in assessing the endangered Florida panther’s habitat and viability in order to facilitate proposed real estate development in southwest Florida.
According to a senior biologist at the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), agency officials knowingly used flawed science in the agency's assessment of the endangered Florida panther’s habitat and viability in order to facilitate proposed real estate development in southwest Florida.1
Andrew Eller, Jr., a biologist who worked at the FWS for 18 years, charged that agency officials knowingly inflated data about panther population viability, and minimized assessments of the panthers’ habitat needs.2 The FWS used the flawed data as a basis for several documents, including its Multi-species Recovery Plan3 and at least 19 biological opinions, which were used to approve development applications. The Army Corps of Engineers used the same pattern of errors in its Southwest Florida Environmental Impact Statement. Over the past decade, FWS has approved permits for development on tens of thousands of acres of panther habitat.4
Under the George W. Bush administration, Eller felt officials were unwilling to correct inaccurate science that underlies habitat assessment practices. In frustration over the situation, Eller filed a legal complaint against the government with the help of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Eller, who worked for over a decade in Florida's Panther Recovery Program, stated, “I could no longer tolerate the scientific charade in which U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials are trying to pretend that the Florida panther is not in jeopardy.”5
Among the charges in Eller’s complaint was the allegation that FWS assessments inflated estimates of Florida panther populations by erroneously assuming that all known panthers are breeding adults. This analysis discounted juvenile, aged, and ill animals.
In addition, Eller charged, the FWS knowingly minimized assessments of the panther's habitat needs by equating daytime habitat use patterns (when the panther is at rest) with nighttime habitat use patterns (when the panther is most active).6 The FWS also employed a controversial model developed by Dr. David Maehr, known as “panther habitat evaluation model” or PHEM, which posited that panthers inhabited only large tracts of unbroken forest.7 Any other land, such as wetland or smaller pieces of forested land, was deemed not to be essential panther habitat—and was therefore open to development.
The serious errors in the science used to guide agency actions were identified by members of a scientific advisory subteam that was organized by the FWS in 1999 to help develop a habitat conservation strategy for the panther. Although Maehr was a member of the FWS subteam, several others members published research showing that Florida panthers range through a mosaic of habitats, and critiqued the biased data samples and other inaccuracies in the PHEM model. In 2002, the FWS issued a Landscape Conservation Strategy based on the subteam's work, but the report included contradictory information, since it did not repudiate the PHEM model.8