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Stakeholder Profile: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is the principal Federal agency responsible for conserving, protecting and enhancing fish, wildlife and plants and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people. The Service manages the 95-million-acre National Wildlife Refuge System, which encompasses 545 national wildlife refuges, thousands of small wetlands and other special management areas. It also operates 69 national fish hatcheries, 64 fishery resources offices and 81 ecological services field stations. The agency enforces Federal wildlife laws, administers the Endangered Species Act, manages migratory bird populations, restores nationally significant fisheries, conserves and restores wildlife habitat such as wetlands, and helps foreign and Native American Tribal governments with their conservation efforts. It also oversees the Federal Assistance program, which distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in excise taxes on fishing and hunting equipment to State fish and wildlife agencies.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service serves on the Adaptive Management Work Group to identify and advocate for Glen Canyon Dam operations that can benefit fish and wildlife downstream, particularly those species at risk of extinction, and to help shape dam operations to minimize effects to species. When the Secretary of the Interior chooses to implement an AMWG recommendation that may affect threatened or endangered species, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service consults on those effects, makes recommendations to minimize or offset those effects and may permit the measured take of some species.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service provides endangered species management expertise to the Technical Working Group that studies the effects of dam operations, designs flow experiments and provides detailed recommendations to the Adaptive Management Program. Additionally, the agency’s fisheries resource office has the primary responsibility for monitoring and developing management proposals for the endangered fishes of the Little Colorado River and participates in fisheries management efforts on the mainstem Colorado River in Grand Canyon .