Department of the Interior December 24, 2015 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

This order transfers administrative jurisdiction of 501.43 acres of public lands from the Secretary of the Interior to the Secretary of Navy for the realignment of the Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range boundary in Riverside County, California. This transfer of administrative jurisdiction is directed by the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs Eastern Oklahoma Region has prepared a draft environmental impact statement for the management of oil and gas resources owned by the United States in trust for the Osage in Osage County, Oklahoma. This notice amends the notice of availability published in the Federal Register on Friday, November 6, 2015 (80 FR 68867), and extends the public comment period through January 15, 2016, to accommodate requests for more time.

We (National Park Service) will ask the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to approve an information collection (IC) concerning a national household survey that will be used to help determine the perceptions of the American public regarding the national park system. The collection will include no more than 40 cognitive interviews to refine survey questions and a final survey instrument based on the findings from those interviews. As required by the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 and as part of our continuing efforts to reduce paperwork and respondent burden, we invite the general public and other federal agencies to take this opportunity to comment on this IC. We may not conduct or sponsor, and a person is not required to respond to, a collection of information unless it displays a currently valid OMB Control Number.

In this Candidate Notice of Review (CNOR), we, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service), present an updated list of plant and animal species native to the United States that we regard as candidates for or have proposed for addition to the Lists of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, as amended. Identification of candidate species can assist environmental planning efforts by providing advance notice of potential listings, and by allowing landowners and resource managers to alleviate threats and thereby possibly remove the need to list species as endangered or threatened. Even if we subsequently list a candidate species, the early notice provided here could result in more options for species management and recovery by prompting candidate conservation measures to alleviate threats to the species. This CNOR summarizes the status and threats that we evaluated in order to determine that species qualify as candidates, to assign a listing priority number (LPN) to each species, and to determine whether a species should be removed from candidate status. Additional material that we relied on is available in the Species Assessment and Listing Priority Assignment Forms (species assessment forms) for each candidate species. This CNOR changes the LPN for two candidates and removes two species from candidate status. Combined with other decisions for individual species that were published separately from this CNOR in the past year, the current number of species that are candidates for listing is 60. This document also includes our findings on resubmitted petitions and describes our progress in revising the Lists of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants (Lists) during the period October 1, 2014, through September 30, 2015. Moreover, we request any additional status information that may be available for the candidate species identified in this CNOR.