NEW YORK, Nov. 27 (Xinhua) -- U.S. wildlife officials finalized a recovery plan for imperiled populations of Canada lynx on Wednesday and proposed new habitat protections in the southern Rocky Mountains for the forest-dwelling wildcats threatened by climate change and human activities.
"The fate of the plan is uncertain under President-elect Donald Trump: officials during the Republican's first term sought unsuccessfully to strip lynx of protections that they've had since 2000 under the Endangered Species Act," said The Associated Press in its report about the development.
Almost 7,700 square miles (20,000 square miles) of forests and mountains in Colorado and northern New Mexico are covered under the habitat proposal. That's a change from previous U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service policies that left out the southern Rockies and concentrated instead on recovery efforts elsewhere, including Wyoming, Montana, Minnesota and Maine.
Areas of protected habitat also are being added along the Idaho-Montana border. Protected areas in Wyoming would be sharply reduced under Wednesday's proposal, according to the report.
Wildlife officials said they were removing some locations where officials consider lynx unlikely to thrive in the future, while adding new areas considered more suitable to their long-term survival.
Lynx are elusive animals that live in cold boreal forests and prey primarily on snowshoe hares. Climate change is melting away their snowy habitat and could decrease the availability of snowshoe hares, according to the report.
