A Lack of Direction: Improving Marbled Murrelet Habitat Conservation Under the Forest and Range Practices Act

In 2002, the federal Canadian Wildlife Service published a document that compiled the best and most current information available on MAMU in BC. In 2003, the Canadian Wildlife Service published a second document in which a broad-based Canadian Marbled Murrelet Recovery Team applied information from the 2002 report to develop a MAMU recovery strategy for purposes of the federal Species at Risk Act. That was followed by a risk assessment. This report will not differentiate among those reports, referring to all three collectively as the “Conservation Assessment”.

The Conservation Assessment noted that, unlike most threatened species, MAMU are still relatively abundant; perhaps 65,000 live along the coast of BC and some 500,000 along coastal Alaska . Nevertheless, MAMU have been listed as threatened by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) since 1990.