Ya-Wei Li

Defenders of Wildlife · Endangered Species Conservation

The U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) protects over 2,000 species, but no concise, standardized metrics exist for assessing changes in species recovery status. Tracking these changes is crucial to understanding species status, adjusting conservation strategies, and assessing the performance of the ESA. We helped develop and test novel metrics that...

Evaluating how wildlife conservation laws are implemented is critical for safeguarding biodiversity. Two agencies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service (FWS and NMFS; Services collectively), are responsible for implementing the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), which requires federal protection for threatened an...

Recovering species is one of the main goals of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). In the face of limited budgets, diverse tools are needed to find efficient solutions. Recovery units may be one such tool -designated portions of a species range that must be recovered individually before an entire species can be considered recovered. Recovery units al...

The U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) is widely considered the strongest biodiversity conservation law in the world. Part of its strength comes from the mandate to use the best available science to make decisions under the law, including whether to list a species, setting the criteria for when a species can be considered recovered, and determining...

To protect biodiversity, conservation laws should be evaluated and improved using data. We provide a comprehensive assessment of how a key provision of the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) is implemented: consultation to ensure federal actions do not jeopardize the existence of listed species. Data from all 24,893 consultations recorded by the Nat...

A BSTRACT Data on the implementation of laws and policies are essential to the evaluation and improvement of governance. For conservation laws like the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), such data can inform actions that may determine the persistence or extinction of species. A central but controversial part of the ESA is section 7, which requires...

Recovery planning is an essential part of implementing the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), but conservationists and government agencies recognize challenges with the current planning process. Using data from all U.S. domestic and transboundary ESA‐listed species, we quantify the completeness, timeliness, age, and other variation among ESA recove...

Recovery planning is an essential part of implementing the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), but conservationists and government agencies recognize challenges with the current planning process. Using data from all U.S. domestic and transboundary ESA-listed species, we quantify the completeness, timeliness, age, and other variation among ESA recove...

Recovery planning is an essential part of implementing the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), but conservationists and government agencies recognize challenges with the current planning process. Using data from all U.S. domestic and transboundary ESA-listed species, we quantify the completeness, timeliness, age, and other variation among ESA recove...

Recovery planning is an essential part of implementing the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), but conservationists and government agencies recognize challenges with the current planning process. Using data from all U.S. domestic and transboundary ESA-listed species, we quantify the completeness, timeliness, age, and other variation among ESA recove...

Compliance monitoring is an integral part of law and policy implementation. A lack of compliance monitoring for the Endangered Species Act (ESA), driven in part by resource limitations, may be undercutting efforts to recover threatened and endangered species. Here we evaluate the utility of freely available satellite and aerial imagery as a cost-ef...

Evaluating how wildlife conservation laws are implemented is critical to determining how best to protect biodiversity. Two agencies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service (FWS and NMFS; Services collectively), are responsible for implementing the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA). This creates a "natural experimen...

Recovery planning is an essential part of implementing the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), but conservationists and government agencies recognize challenges with the current planning process. Common criticisms are that too many species lack recovery plans, plans take too long to write, and they are rarely updated to include new information. Usin...

Recovery planning is an essential part of implementing the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), but conservationists and government agencies recognize many problems with the planning process. Common criticisms are that too many species lack recovery plans, plans take too long to write, and they are rarely updated to include new information. Using dat...

Recovery planning is an essential part of implementing the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), but conservationists and government agencies recognize many problems with the planning process. Common criticisms are that too many species lack recovery plans, plans take too long to write, and they are rarely updated to include new information. Using dat...

Managers of large, complex wildlife conservation programs need information on the conservation status of each of many species to help strategically allocate limited resources. Oversimplifying status data, however, runs the risk of missing information essential to strategic allocation. Conservation status consists of two components, the status of th...

Cross-tabulation of taxonomic groups represented in our dataset

Examples of text from Fish and Wildlife Service five-year reviews that resulted in different scores across the key in Table 1 of the main text

The regulatory framework of listing, reclassification, and recovery

An example of training data that might be given to FWS biologists for scoring a large set of species

Managers of large, complex wildlife conservation programs need information on the conservation status of each of many species to help strategically allocate limited resources. Oversimplifying status data, however, runs the risk of missing information essential to strategic allocation. Conservation status consists of two components, the status of th...

Managers of large, complex wildlife conservation programs need information on the conservation status of each of many species to help strategically allocate limited resources. Oversimplifying status data, however, runs the risk of missing information essential to strategic allocation. Conservation status consists of two components, the status of th...

Managers of large wildlife conservation programs need information on the conservation status of each of many species to strategically allocate limited resources. Oversimplified status data, however, runs the risk of missing information essential to strategic allocation. Conservation status consists of two components, the status of threats a species...

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) has succeeded in shielding hundreds of species from extinction and improving species recovery over time. However, recovery for most species officially protected by the ESA - i.e., listed species-has been harder to achieve than initially envisioned. Threats to species are persistent and pervasive, funding has been in...

Significance The US Endangered Species Act is the most comprehensive law any nation has enacted to protect imperiled species. Many of its protections come from section 7 of the Act, but how government regulators use this tool is poorly understood. Our analysis is the first to systematically evaluate how the US Fish and Wildlife Service has implemen...

Despite data gaps and information shortfalls, government agencies in the United States are expected to produce timely and defensible decisions to regulate pesticide use under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act and in compliance with the Endangered Species Act. The decision to register a pesticide is predicated on a conclusion t...

While the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been a success, it is not without challenges. 1,2 The ESA serves as a backstop that triggers regulation to prevent species extinctions; however, it has been less effective at recovering species and preventing them from becoming listed altogether. 3,4 Without incentives for species management and envir...

To improve pesticide consultations under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), at least three key questions should be answered. First, under the ESA, what level of risk to ESA-listed species is acceptable from the registration of a pesticide under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act? Second, how will the federal agencies that implem...

Using the examples of invasive species and transpacific air pollution, this essay outlines challenges to U.S. domestic environmental law and policy posed by global dimensions of sociolegal and biophysical systems. As will be seen, the deep interconnectivity of such systems suggests that significant determinants of environmental sustainability will...