Web Apps for Tiny Mice
The tiny, sand-colored Alabama beach mouse makes its home on the white sand shores of the southern coast. Listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) since 1985, the mouse builds complex burrows throughout the coastal dunes of Alabama. Unfortunately for the mouse, it’s not the only critter that enjoys what the Alabama shores have to offer — humans have been flocking to this region in increasing numbers, looking to build vacation homes or simply enjoy all that the white-sand beaches have to offer. The Alabama beach mouse population has been declining over the years, largely due to habitat loss and fragmentation associated with residential and commercial development. In the battle for prime sandy real estate, it can be hard for this tiny mouse to pull ahead.
Thankfully, the ESA has tools to help keep some of the mouse’s habitat — termed “critical habitat” — shielded from human influence, and recovery plans to help guide human actions to ensure the mouse population can increase. Let’s say you were interested in the details of how the ESA’s recovery plans are protecting these mice and their desirable habitat, or what a potential homeowner must consider when wanting to build a home on coastal land. Homeowners and federal agencies alike must have the correct approvals and do a proper analysis of potential impacts before building in species’ habitats. For Federal agencies, these construction actions may require a consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service, resulting in a formal document analyzing the action, called a biological opinion. Unfortunately, looking into the recovery plans to help conserve the species in recent years or finding recent biological opinions for actions in a target habitat can be quite a challenge. Where do you look for this kind of information? What kind of documents are publicly available, and how do you access them? Finding these sorts of answers on government websites can often be difficult or even impossible.
At Defenders’ Center for Conservation Innovation, we’ve developed web apps to help you in your quest. By visiting our homepage at cci-dev.org, you can access information on our current research, links to web apps, peer-reviewed papers, mapping projects, and more! To investigate recovery actions for the mouse and approved construction in its habitat, you will want recovery documents such as 5-year reviews and habitat conservation plans or permit documents that detail what construction actions have recently been approved within beach mouse territory.
To help find these and other documents, we’ve developed ESAdocs Search, a search engine that contains over 15,000 ESA-related documents ranging from Federal Register notices to recovery plans and more. The text of all the documents is fully searchable, and the app returns any ESA-related documents that mention the Alabama beach mouse. Interested only in documents since 2009? By clicking the “filters” button on the app, you can customize a date range that fits your specific search. Looking for only Federal Register notices that mention the mouse? You can filter the documents returned in the search by type, finding only those relevant to your inquiry.
Using ESAdocs Search is an easy and quick way to access materials to answer your questions about listed species, recovery plans, or even to simply satisfy your curiosity. Be sure to visit cci-dev.org for more information on all the apps we produce, as well as access helpful usage videos that walk you through the details of using our apps. Next time you’re curious about how to conserve this little mouse — or any one of the other >1,600 ESA listed species — think of CCI and ESAdocs Search.
