With the U.S. military proposing live-fire practice on Pagan, Department of Land and Natural Resources Secretary Richard Seman called the island a \u201cmidpoint\u201d instrument in the department\u2019s access to the rest of the Northern Islands.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you understand the Northern Islands, everything that our future holds with the Northern Island is tied into Pagan. Pagan is by far the only place where you will be able to have a runway, where you may able to build a facility, where a fuel station might occur,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo when we start talking about the entire Northern Islands, whether it\u2019s a marine monument, whether you are talking about the three sanctuary islands\u2014everything that will get you there, Pagan plays a big role.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce you give up Pagan, you just triple the difficulty for the rest of the Northern Islands,\u201d he said, adding that all their projects in the Northern Islands, whether on Sariguan, Alamagan or Aguiguan\u2014 involved Pagan.<\/p>\n
Pagan plays \u201ca big role in how we do our work\u201d because of its proximity and how fuel can be offloaded there via helicopter, he said.<\/p>\n
He said restricted access, or restricted air or sea space, \u201cwill completely disrupt our ability to do our work the way we\u2019ve been doing it.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt will make assessment difficult. It will make recovery plans [for terrestrial species] difficult,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
For one, the Marianas Avifauna Conservation project, headed by the Division of Fish and Wildlife, will eventually be on Pagan, according to DFW biologist Tyler Willsey yesterday.<\/p>\n
The MAC project \u201ctranslocates\u201d bird species to islands free from the brown tree snake.<\/p>\n
These target islands are Sarigan, Guiguan, Alamagan, Pagan, Agrihan, and Asuncion.<\/p>\n
\u201cDepending upon access allowed\u201d to the project by the Department of Defense, a MAC report proposed a project timeline to 2032 to move these bird species.<\/p>\n
Manuel Pangelinan, DFW director, earlier said his division evaluates concerns of \u201ccompeting use\u201d and will have to determine \u201cwhether that\u2019s the best place [Pagan] to continue with program.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With the U.S. military proposing live-fire practice on Pagan, Department of Land and Natural Resources…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1584,4366,4367,541],"class_list":["post-200939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-dfw","tag-mac","tag-marianas-avifauna-conservation","tag-northern-islands"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200939\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}