More than half of the nation’s wildlife refuges lack the resources and staff needed to fulfill their missions and the problem is only getting worse, according to Fish and Wildlife Service surveys of refuge leaders.
The agency’s internal self-assessment found in July that managers at 59 percent of all refuges reported being unable to achieve their goals due to insufficient resources. That marked a slight worsening since March, when 57 percent of refuges were reported to lack sufficient resources, according to documents obtained by Defenders of Wildlife.
“It appears that many of those that have been most affected by loss of staff are some of the refuges that are most important for wildlife,” said Nathan Marcy, the senior federal lands policy analyst with Defenders of Wildlife. “So the impacts of the staffing are not necessarily evenly or randomly distributed. They’re actually having negative consequences in some of the places that can least afford it.”
Marcy obtained the Fish and Wildlife Service’s refuge survey results and crunched the spreadsheet numbers, which have not been previously made public. They reflect the refuge-by-refuge consequences of what FWS notes has been a 29 percent decline in refuge employees since fiscal 2011.
