Oil and Gas Research for Lizards
What do oil and gas wells and a small, imperiled lizard have to do with one another? If you’re me, the Conservation GIS Analyst in the Center for Conservation Innovation at Defenders of Wildlife, then a lot!
The dunes sagebrush lizard is a small spiny lizard that inhabits shinnery oak sand dunes in parts of eastern New Mexico and west Texas. The species has been under consideration for listing under the Endangered Species Act since 1982, because that part of the country has long been the focus of oil and gas development that destroys and fragments habitat. Most recently, the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed to list the species as endangered, but that proposal was withdrawn in 2012, in large part because of voluntary conservation agreements in both New Mexico and Texas. The lizard has received renewed attention in the past year because of emerging threats — sand mining that targets their dune habitat — but to understand the scope of what needs to be done for the species, we needed to understand whether or not the voluntary agreements were working.
It turns out that we can use publicly available oil and gas data to test the effectiveness of the agreements! We did this by comparing the number of oil and gas development sites before and after the agreements took effect, inside and outside of the lizard’s range. The comparison is critical to understanding the conservation plans’ effectiveness: it’s how we can control for any changes in the broader oil and gas market. For example, if we looked inside the lizard’s range and saw well approvals decline after the agreement was created, we wouldn’t know if the decline was because of the agreement or other, outside forces. In contrast, if we see a decline inside the range after the agreement but not outside, then we can infer that the agreement was responsible for the decline. Because the New Mexico agreements required that lizard habitat be avoided with new wells, but the Texas agreements only suggested it be avoided, we hypothesized we would find a positive effect for lizards in New Mexico but not Texas.
When I mapped all the wells approved before and after the agreements in both states and tallied them inside and outside of the lizard’s range, that’s exactly what I found. In New Mexico, the rate of oil and gas development in the lizard’s range declined after the agreements were signed relative to outside the range:
In contrast, in Texas, the rate of oil and gas well approval within the lizard’s range did not differ from the rate outside the range:
The controls outside of habitat were critical. The well approvals declined inside the lizard’s range, but that decline was about the same as the rate outside of the areas covered by the agreement. This strongly suggests that the Texas voluntary conservation plan was not protecting the lizard’s habitat.
The well approval research outlined above is an example of the science-based work of Defenders of Wildlife in the Center for Conservation Innovation, and is now undergoing scientific peer review in the journal F1000 Research. It is essential to informing what we know about the lizard’s conservation. Unfortunately, in addition to the oil and gas development that has not been addressed through the current conservation plan in Texas, sand mining operations are further jeopardizing the species. In response to these threats and the lack of effectiveness of the Texas plan, we, along with the Center for Biological Diversity, have petitioned the US Fish and Wildlife Service to list the species as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Defenders and the Center for Conservation Innovation will continue to use these and other emerging methods to find which species need to be protected, and where, and use science to advocate for the best conservation outcomes.
