At the Council’s April 24, 2007 request, the ISRP reviewed a revised proposal for the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes’ Southern Idaho Wildlife Mitigation Project. This is a follow-up review to the ISRP’s final review of the original FY 2007-09 proposal. The ISRP found the original proposal “not fundable” because it did not include a narrative section including the key scientific information needed to justify the proposed actions.
The ISRP found that the revised proposal "Meets Scientific Review Criteria (Qualified)." The revised proposal describes the background, accomplishments, relationships to other projects, and plans for M&E so now meets scientific review criteria (qualified). The ISRP recommendation is qualified because no documentation of benefits to fish and wildlife are provided; no plans for analysis and presentation of results are presented; and work elements to enhance habitat are not clearly linked to existing habitat conditions and landscape features. Documentation and plans should be developed in time to provide the needed information to fully justify the project in the next project selection process.
The ISRP also notes that the revised proposal states that HEP will be used to evaluate the project. The ISRP has gone on record as having concerns with using HEP for monitoring purposes. In our 1997-2005 Retrospective Report, we “urged the Wildlife program away from a sole emphasis on Habitat Evaluation Procedure (HEP) evaluation and toward more accountability (M&E) for actual wildlife populations” (ISRP 2005-14). We again emphasized this point in our Programmatic Comments for our FY 2007-09 project review (ISRP 2006-4a). The ISRP recommends that HEP should only be used as an initial scoring system for mitigation agreements and should not play any role in biological monitoring.
