gary_williams@nps.gov
Inventory and Monitoring Program Manager, Natural Resource Information Division; Natural Resource Program Center, Fort Collins, Colorado


Back to Chapter 1: Confluence

Natural Resource Challenge funds Exotic Plant Management Teams
By Linda Drees and Gary Johnston

CESUs and the inventory and monitoring networks:
A case of good timing
By Kathy Tonnessen, Ron Hiebert, and Larry Norris

Connecting the public, scientists, and resources through learning centers
By Don Neubacher

Four new cooperative ecosystem studies units established

Natural resource project funding increased

The Challenge funds native and exotic species management

Geologic Resources Division expands expertise

Award-Winner Profile - Gary Machlis receives Conservation Service Award

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In FY 2000 the NPS Inventory and Monitoring (I&M) Program received a base increase of $7.3 million for accelerating 11 of the 12 basic inventories initiated by the program in 1992. In particular, the increase is for vertebrate and vascular plant inventories, which had received little funding since the program began. The funding will allow the National Park Service to complete all of the basic resource inventories in about seven to eight years.

Most of the nonbiological inventories have been conducted by staff of the I&M Program; the biological inventories, on the other hand, will be managed primarily by NPS regional and park personnel. The inventories will be conducted in collaboration with local universities and state and federal agencies to establish partnerships and agreements to share costs and avoid duplication of effort. For that reason, a small portion of the increased funding was given to the regional offices to hire inventory coordinators to carry out those functions. The Park Service also designed and adopted a national strategy for organizing the biological inventories and implementing the park vital signs monitoring called for in the Natural Resource Challenge. Under this strategy, all of the units in the national park system that have significant natural resources (“natural resource parks”) have been assigned to one of 32 separate networks of parks that share similar ecological characteristics. The regional I&M coordinators worked with the networks in FY 2000 to develop inventories and to begin implementing them.

Five million dollars of the FY 2000 increase was allocated to vertebrate and vascular plant inventories, including approximately $1 million for special inventories of amphibian populations in 12 parks. These particular parks will be incorporated into a larger amphibian research and monitoring effort of the U.S. Geological Survey. The amphibian inventories acquired much of the baseline information needed to support future research in these parks and also yield information that park managers can use to address a variety of resource management and protection issues. For example, preliminary research at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks has suggested that introductions of sport fish into previously fishless lakes may have led to the extirpation of amphibians in some of those areas.

Inventories of park, local, regional, and university museums and herbaria were undertaken to acquire and verify as much information as possible on species occurrence in the parks. More than 239,000 species records for parks were verified, obtained, and incorporated into a new national database that includes information on more than 68,000 voucher specimens (i.e., those that document the occurrence of a species in a particular park). This represents the first time that the National Park Service has so comprehensively verified a database on park vertebrates and vascular plants. In addition to compiling and verifying existing species information, another focus of the vertebrate and vascular plant inventory has been to fund the most acute resource inventory needs in parks that are most capable of implementing new, integrated inventory methods. One recipient of such funding was the Pacific Island Network. Nesting Tahiti petrels were discovered on the summit of Mt. Lata, on Ta’u in the National Park of American Samoa. This seabird was not previously known to breed in American Samoa. The inventories also documented the recent arrival of an introduced finch and several plant species in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Early identification is important for rapid control of exotic species.

The FY 2000 funding also sped up nonbiological inventories. For example, more than 6,000 base maps and related data products were acquired for 230 parks, increasing to 248 (96 percent) the number of parks for which this inventory has been completed. Additionally, data on several air quality parameters were assembled from existing national data sets for use in statistically estimating air quality in parks that do not have air quality–monitoring stations. This approach is cheaper than measuring air quality in each park and will provide for the first time comprehensive air quality information for all natural resource parks. These baseline data will be critical in determining where future monitoring is needed to measure changes in park air quality, both locally and regionally, throughout the national park system.

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Last Updated: 06/17/2001
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