The prickly price of threatened and endangered cacti
By Dave Worthington and Pete Fonken

“Prices [for federally listed cacti] are high enough to make collection profitable but low enough to ensure continued demand.”

POACHERS COLLECT THE THREATENED Winkler cactus (Pediocactus winkleri) and endangered Wright’s fishhook cactus (Sclerocactus wrightiae) from park lands and sell them internationally over the Internet. These federally listed plants are small (about the size of a 50-cent piece) and in spring have attractive, colorful blooms, making them popular for planting in personal rock gardens. Web sites offer individual plants of these two species for $10 and packets of 10 seeds for about $2. These prices are high enough to make collection profitable but low enough to ensure continued demand.

NPS

Winkler cactus (Pediocactus winkleri), a plant federally listed as threatened, is illegally collected from federal lands in and near Capitol Reef National Park in southern Utah.

NPS

Staff members at Capitol Reef National Park have spent countless hours installing, testing, checking, and repairing surveillance equipment in the field.

Illegal collecting of these sensitive cactus species occurs in Capitol Reef National Park—Utah’s second largest national park. Situated on the Colorado Plateau roughly halfway between Zion and Arches National Parks in south-central Utah, Capitol Reef is 70 miles (113 km) long and, though only 13 miles (21 km) across at its widest point, encompasses 378 square miles (979 km2) of remote and rugged topography. In addition the park’s perimeter measures nearly 200 miles (322 km), intersecting many backcountry roads and multiple entrances and making protection of sensitive resources challenging.

Through the Natural Resources Protection Fund, the NPS Biological Resource Management Division funded a three-year project at Capitol Reef to test surveillance products for detecting illegal collection of these cacti. Many parks use similar technology to protect resources, such as intrusion-detection systems in historical buildings and remote sensors to detect people entering an archaeological site. At Capitol Reef, however, staff faced an additional challenge: scattered, remote locations. Most off-the-shelf products are not appropriate for installation in isolated areas where response times are measured in hours or days. This situation required technology that could record events for later review, securely notify personnel when an event occurred, and remain unattended for long periods.

Staff members of the Division of Resource Management and Science and the Division of Visitor and Resource Protection sought the assistance of personnel from three agencies as they developed surveillance techniques. Technicians and law enforcement personnel from the USDA Forest Service combined tried-and-true equipment with new technologies, including Web-based and satellite systems. A special agent with the National Park Service helped test and deploy equipment, and a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service special agent ensured that the selected techniques would be legally valid under the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and Lacey Act Amendments of 1981, which are used to prosecute poaching.

NPS

The open, sparsely vegetated habitat of the cacti makes installation of surveillance equipment challenging.

In the second year of this project and the first year of field-testing equipment, park staff has learned that it is not possible to schedule too much time to test, place, and check equipment. That is, equipment can break, and resoldering a broken wire may require a two-hour trip. A long drive may result in the discovery that a suspected cactus poacher is really a rabbit or a cow. Nevertheless, park staff is excited by the potential that this cutting-edge technology possesses. Having figured out most of the quirks and system limitations and how to remotely differentiate between a thunderstorm and a passing vehicle, employees at Capitol Reef are optimistic that the systems deployed in the field will work effectively. In addition, because plants and animals cross administrative boundaries, park managers are developing a memorandum of understanding with the Bureau of Land Management and USDA Forest Service that will allow law enforcement personnel to work across boundaries to enforce resource laws. Staff at Capitol Reef believe that in cooperation with these other agencies, the techniques and lessons learned thus far will help lead to apprehension of plant poachers and be useful to other managers caring for threatened and endangered resources in remote areas.