[Taxacom] progressive permitting regimes

[Frederick W Schueler]

Taxacomers & Alienists,

Apologies to those for whom this is a cross-posting. Scientific
collectors all over the world suffer from erratic regulatory permitting
regimes, which often change inexplicably at the apparent whim of
government bureaucracies.

We've recently suffered such a setback, where a taxon for which we'd
just launched a public participation programme has been saddled with
draconian restrictions on capture and possession, in the interests of
preventing the spread of alien invasives, but without any exemptions for
citizens who might be studying the status of populations, or just
interested in them. The regulatory agency is so overworked that when we
apply for permits to take this taxon, we often don't even get an e-mail
response to a request for renewal of permits which they'd issued to us
the year before and for which we promptly reported our results in
detail.  This worries us, because it means that if permitting is
required for every time a organism is caught (as stipulated in the new
regulations) it will most certainly be impossible to continue our public
education and public reporting of monitoring.

So often the prohibitions in collecting regulations are not on the
action which is to be prohibited, but on supposed consequences of the
discouraged act which, if proven, will make conviction convenient for
the enforcing agency (e.g. prohibitions on possession of shed feathers
or skins). These prohibitions generally are not enforced or prosecuted
when they obviously aren't the result of a "wrong" act (at least in
Canada), but they do have a chilling effect on the increase of
biological knowledge.  Also, a responsible collector is generally in a
better position to make the judgement of the conservation consequences
and scientific importance of any collection than a regulator setting
rules for an entire species or higher taxon.

We'd like to propose that restrictions on possession and transportation
not be imposed on organisms preserved as scientific specimens, so long
as date and locality data are in the containers with the specimens, and
that a priori permitting not be required for taking numbers of specimens
which would have no significant impact on native populations of the
organisms, so long as the collections are reported to the agency before
the end of the calendar year (these are not organisms for which there's
any known threat of undue human exploitation).

I wonder if there's any jurisdiction which handles the regulation of
scientific collecting in this way? The one case I know of where status
as a specimen makes a difference is importing plants from the US into
Canada, where "herbarium specimens" are exempted from the restrictions
on "plant material."

fred schueler
------------------------------------------------------------
             Bishops Mills Natural History Centre
           Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad
        RR#2 Bishops Mills, Ontario, Canada K0G 1T0
     on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44* 52'N 75* 42'W
       (613)258-3107 <bckcdb at istar.ca> http://pinicola.ca
------------------------------------------------------------