IPaC and critical habitat (US Fish and Wildlife Service)

IPaC, short for Information for Planning and Consultation, is a project planning tool run by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, built around a map.¹ Draw a project area on it and it returns the federally protected wildlife resources known or expected on or near that area.¹ These include listed and proposed species, critical habitat, migratory birds, certain marine mammals, wetlands, coastal barrier units and National Wildlife Refuge lands.¹ Anyone can use it, and the printed resource list needs no account.¹ Species that are solely the responsibility of NOAA Fisheries, mostly marine ones, are left out.¹

The legal hook is section 7 of the Endangered Species Act. Federal agencies must ask the Secretary of the Interior whether listed or proposed species may be present in the area of a proposed action.¹ So a project that a federal agency carries out, funds, permits or licenses must obtain an official species list.¹ The official list is a letter from the local field office, issued through IPaC after logging in and defining a project, and it is valid for 90 days.¹ If the agency finds the project "may affect" a species or its critical habitat, it must consult the Service, and IPaC's Consultation Package Builder helps assemble a biological analysis suitable for use as the biological assessment.¹ A project with no federal nexus, one not funded, carried out or permitted by a federal agency, may use IPaC for information.¹ In a model of a place, IPaC belongs to the rules layer.

Critical habitat is the specific areas the Service identifies as essential to the conservation of a species proposed for listing as endangered or threatened, published as a rule with boundaries in the Federal Register.² Designations affect only federal agency actions and activities that are federally funded or permitted; they do not affect land ownership or allow government or public access to private land.² Federal agencies may not destroy or adversely modify designated critical habitat.² IPaC finds it by overlaying the drawn area on the Service's maps of species ranges and designated critical habitat.¹

The critical habitat maps can be taken away. The ECOS report offers a shapefile per species, two national zip files and ArcGIS feature and tile services, with the bulk files last dated 31 August 2026.³ There are 995 critical habitats in it, proposed and final.³ Final critical habitat totals about 112 million acres and 35,000 stream miles.³ Not every designation is in the portal, and species solely under NOAA Fisheries are mapped elsewhere.³ For software, the IPaC Location API takes a line or polygon written as well-known text, a standard notation for shapes, or as GeoJSON.⁴ It returns species, critical habitat, field office, refuges and wetlands for that shape.⁴