For months, David Wilcove peppered the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) with letters protesting the agency's plans to save the threatened Utah prairie dog. Wilcove, a conservation biologist, and his colleagues at Environmental Defense in Washington, D.C., argued that FWS was putting too much emphasis on protecting prairie dogs on federal lands, when most of the animals now live on private land and cannot be relocated easily. In the midst of this typical conservation battle—scientist-advocates on one side, resource managers on the other— Wilcove made an atypical move. Conceding that his organization and the FWS were both shooting from the hip, making cases based on skimpy data, he flew a team from Princeton University to Utah last November to meet with agency managers and Environmental Defense officials. The Princeton group, led by biologist Andrew Dobson, began working up what the cash-strapped FWS could not afford to do on its own: a model on how various factors, from climate to disease epidemics, would affect Utah prairie dogs. "When the study is done this spring, we'll all have a better blueprint for determining the relative importance of public and private lands," Wilcove says.
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