Sierra Club v. Martin
United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit
168 F. 3d 1 (1999)
The Forest Service (defendant) proposed timber sales involving road construction and water discharges in Georgia's Chattahoochee and Oconee National Forests without collecting population data for proposed, endangered, threatened, or sensitive (PETS) species, as the governing forest plan and Forest Service regulations required; the Sierra Club (plaintiff) sued, and the district court granted the Forest Service summary judgment, accepting its argument that habitat information alone sufficed and that regulations, properly read together, required data collection only for management-indicator species (MIS) rather than all PETS species. Sierra Club appealed.
Whether, under the National Forest Management Act, the federal government must gather population data on sensitive species prior to authorizing timber sales in national forests.