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Section: Local
August 15, 2006 Groups sue for tortoise land Move aims to keep off-road drivers out of desert reptiles' wash habitat |
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Preservationists are reviving an effort to rewrite how the government manages off-road vehicle use over more than 7 million acres of desert in Southern California to help save desert tortoises. On Monday, a coalition of nine conservation groups filed suit against the federal government in part to prevent off-road driving in washes where the threatened California desert tortoise lives. The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco, includes hundreds of thousands of acres in Imperial, Riverside and San Bernardino counties east of the Salton Sea and Joshua Tree National Park. The groups argue the government improperly opened washes to off-road riding after a federal judge ordered the land protected in January 2005. "That area has some of the highest density of washes of anywhere in the California desert," said Daniel Patterson, desert ecologist with the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups behind the suit. "And (the federal government) says you can ride your off-road vehicle in every single one." The lawsuit challenges two major land management plans for the western Mojave desert and the northern and eastern Colorado Desert. The Colorado Desert plan, which includes the area east of the Coachella Valley along the Bradshaw Trail south of Interstate 10, was established in 2002. Richard Crowe, a land use planner with the Bureau of Land Management, said the plan was updated to account for concerns for the tortoise cited by the 2005 ruling that closed about 572,000 acres of desert to off-road riding. It was reopened in April 2005. The environmental groups argue the changes were cosmetic and had little impact on the ground. They say off-road drivers can run over the reptiles, crush their burrows and leave garbage that attracts preying ravens. They suggest limiting access to street-legal vehicles only, like in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. Crowe, however, said the area covered by the lawsuit includes places that are the least frequented by off-road riders, or anyone else, in the entire desert. "We think we did a good job and did the right job," said Crowe, who worked eight years on the plan. William Boarman, a biologist at San Diego State, said off-road riding is one of many hazards facing the tortoise. The number of adult tortoises per square kilometer in a region that includes the Coachella Valley has dropped from 10.8 to 6.38 since 2001. Boarman said it is probably rare that an off-road vehicle would actually run over a tortoise. But he added that it is difficult to know because people could easily crush a young tortoise and not even know it. Although they grow to weigh as much as 15 pounds, they can start out as small as an inch long. Even Boarman once had a close call driving down a desert road near Searchlight, Nev. "I didn't see it until the last moment, and I'm a tortoise biologist who spends a lot of time looking for tortoises," Boarman said. END |