# ESA recovery plans overview _An Overview of Recovery Plans for ESA-listed Species_ ## Background The U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) requires the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS; collectively, the Services) to develop plans to guide the recovery of listed species, unless doing so is not warranted (e.g., for foreign listed species). Recovery plans have evoloved significantly over the years, as has recovery planning guidance the Services use. The Services’ 1994 recovery planning guidance stated that “the Services will…develop recovery plans within 2-1/2 years after final listing.” But we know a persistent problem is that recovery planning often takes far longer than that. While this problem is a “generally accepted” fact, there is very little quantitative information that can adequately describe the scope of the challenge. ## Goal Our goal with this project is to quantify the completeness, timeliness, and age of ESA recovery plans. ## Data The project uses publicly available data from FWS and NMFS, which is included in linked data projects. ## Code The code for managing and analyzing the data is available through Github, via the linked software project.