Protocol for monitoring environmental setting for National Park Service units: Landscape dynamics, climate, and hydrology

Abstract

Understanding the changing environmental setting of our parks–including vital signs such as land cover, human ecosystem drivers, climate, hydrology, and conservation context–was identified as mission critical by more than 200 of the original 270 I&M natural resource park units. All 32 Inventory & Monitoring Networks identified landscape dynamics and climate as priority vital signs in their long-term monitoring plans, with 31 networks committed to developing one or more monitoring protocols specific to their networks. These vital signs reflected the importance of changing landscape dynamics as drivers of park resource conditions, processes, or the conservation context in which park resources and processes are managed. For example, linkages between landscape dynamics and water resources (water quality, hydrology, and geomorphology), changing species distributions (aquatic and terrestrial, with a focus on exotics), and changes in landscape pattern (habitat fragmentation) and type (land cover, use, and conversion) were the most-cited issues of concern among networks. The goal of this protocol is to meet two primary needs. The first is to provide information about parks and surrounding areas that is relevant and useful to management and planning. Results are reported at multiple scales of management relevance—from watersheds, to parks to many parks. The protocol also provides consistent landscape-level information to a variety of National Park Service (NPS) programs, such as Natural Resource Condition Assessments, State of the Park Reports, as well as planned Wilderness Character Assessments, and Resource Stewardship Strategies. The second is to provide summary and raw data (and tools for accessing those data) to NPS staff who need to use environmental settings data to understand the context for status and trends observed in other vital signs being monitored in parks. For each NPS unit, we have identified a core suite of Areas of Analysis (AOAs) within and surrounding parks, as well as climate monitoring stations, and stream gaging stations. The AOAs used are based on official park or management-area boundaries (and buffers around them), as well as watersheds. For each AOA, or monitoring station, a series of metrics related to land use & cover, climate, and hydrology is generated (a complete list of metrics and descriptions is provided in Appendix C): •791 landscape dynamics metrics, where spatial data are used to calculate summary statistics, such as the total or percent area of a parameter. •26 climate metrics for stations within, near, or relevant to park units. •211 hydrologic measures for stream gaging stations within, near, or in systems that drain into parks. Implementation of this protocol is designed to evolve over time, with a continual evaluation and addition of new AOAs, new sources of relevant data, and new metrics as resource management needs, source data, and methods for using those data change over time.