EPA's Vessel General Permit and Small Vessel General

iotic phenomena to a degree that would be sufficient to reduce the value of the entire critical
habitat for the conservation of the endangered and threatened species for which the critical
habitat was designated.
Evidence Available for the Consultation
For all of the above analyses, we rely on two bodies of evidence for this consultation. We use
the first body of evidence to determine whether or to what degree the proposed general permits
can insure that vessel discharges on, over, or near waters of the U.S. are not likely to jeopardize
the continued existence of endangered or threatened species or result in the destruction or
adverse modification of critical habitat that has been designated for those species. To build this
body of evidence, we search for, gather, and analyze published and unpublished sources that
examine the effectiveness previous programs, and whether or to what degree the program has
had: (1) adverse consequences for natural flora and fauna that have some dependency on the
quality of waters of the United States, or (2) adverse consequences for species that have been
listed as endangered or threatened. In particular, we consider information contained in EPA’s
BE, program reviews of effectiveness, compliance monitoring databases, risk assessments and
ESA Section 7 consultations on similar actions, species status reviews, listing documents,
recovery plans, reports on the status and trends of water quality, past and current research and
population dynamics modeling. We supplement this information by searching for compliance
data from available databases that track the number of inspections and enforcement actions over
time.
We use a second body of evidence to assess the probable consequences of authorizing discharges
of pollutants on, over, or near waters of the United States to endangered or threatened species or
critical habitat that has been designated for those species. To assemble this body of information,
we search peer-reviewed scientific literature, master’s theses and doctoral dissertations,
government reports and studies and reports from commercial vendors. For example, the
National Library of Medicine’s Hazardous Substance Data Bank, TOXNET, Toxline,
EXTOXNET pesticide information profiles provide information on the toxicity of the pollutants.
These searches will focus on identifying recent information on the biology, ecology, distribution,
status, and trends of the threatened and endangered species considered in this consultation. We
consider the results of these searches based on the quality of their study design, sample sizes and
study results. Studies that relied on large sample sizes with small variances are generally ranked
higher than studies that relied on small sample sizes or large variances.
Treatment of “Cumulative Impacts” (in the sense of NEPA)
To address the question of whether the activities that would be authorized by VGPs have direct
and indirect effects on the environment that are small both individually and cumulatively, we
explicitly consider the cumulative impacts of the proposed permits in a “cumulative impact”
section of the Effects of the Action chapter of this Opinion. Here, we use the term “cumulative
impact” in the NEPA sense of the term (the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality defines them
under the term “cumulative effects” but we refer to them as “cumulative impacts” to distinguish
between NEPA and ESA uses of “cumulative effects”). That is, we mean “cumulative impacts”
as “the impact on the environment which results from the incremental impact of the action when
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