Department of the Interior November 16, 2020 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

We, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service), recently proposed to reclassify the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker (Dryobates borealis) as a threatened species with a rule issued under section 4(d) of the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (Act), as amended. We announced a 60-day public comment period on the proposed rule, ending December 7, 2020. We now announce a public informational meeting and public hearing on the proposed rule.

The National Park Service is soliciting electronic comments on the significance of properties nominated before October 31, 2020, for listing or related actions in the National Register of Historic Places.

In this document, known as a Candidate Notice of Review (CNOR), we, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service), present an updated list of domestic plant and animal species 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. 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, 2018, through September 30, 2020. Combined with other decisions for individual species that were published separately from this CNOR in the past year, the current number of domestic species that are candidates for listing is 11. 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 earlier candidate conservation measures to alleviate threats to the species. This document also adds the Sonoran desert tortoise back to the candidate list as a result of an August 3, 2020, court-approved settlement agreement.