From Hawaii to Washington D.C., Americans today are celebrating the sixth annual Endangered Species Day and the 40th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act. The Act is one of the world’s most successful environmental laws, preventing extinction for 99 percent of the animals and plants under its care and putting hundreds on the road to recovery.

In response to a scientific petition filed by the Center for Biological Diversity in November, the federal government announced today that Alaska’s Iliamna Lake seals may need protection under the Endangered Species Act. They are threatened by the development of the proposed Pebble mine as well as by climate change. The National Marine Fisheries Service will now launch a year-long status review of the freshwater seals.

Conservation groups filed a lawsuit today challenging a California Department of Transportation highway-widening project that threatens ancient redwoods, endangered salmon runs and public safety along the wild and scenic Smith River Canyon in remote Del Norte County. Caltrans approved a project to widen existing narrow sections of highways 197 and 199 to provide access for oversized trucks, without adequate environmental review of the impacts under the California Environmental Quality Act.

On the fifth anniversary of polar bears’ placement on the endangered species list, the Center for Biological Diversity today launched federal litigation challenging the Obama administration’s failure to consider “endangered” status for the polar bear or develop a recovery plan for this gravely imperiled species.

Just two decades ago, most of the Arctic Ocean was covered in ice all year long. But climate change has caused the Arctic to heat up twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and the region is rapidly losing its natural protective layer of ice. Oil, gas, fishing and shipping interests are targeting these newly exposed waters. The Arctic’s polar bears, beluga whales, narwhals and other rare creatures are caught in the crosshairs.

The leaders of six of the nation’s most prominent conservation groups today called on the U.S. Department of the Interior to cancel plans by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove federal Endangered Species Act protections for wolves across nearly the entire lower-48 states, stating the plan would be disastrous for gray wolf recovery in the United States.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service revised its proposed listing rule today for the lesser prairie chicken — a rare grouse — to include a special rule that would weaken protections for the bird once it is listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. The prairie chicken was proposed for Endangered Species Act protection in December, but under a special rule added to the proposal today, habitat-destroying activities would be allowed to continue in the bird’s range.

A committee of the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council released a report today that outlines problems with the Environmental Protection Agency’s oversight of dangerous pesticides that are hurting endangered species across the country. The report comes when the EPA is decades behind in assessing the effects of hundreds of chemicals on endangered wildlife.

U.S. conservation groups formally requested trade sanctions against Mexico today to stop the country’s massive loggerhead sea turtle bycatch. Each year Mexican fisheries off the southern Baja California peninsula kill more than 2,000 endangered loggerheads as they fish for halibut and sharks.