National Wilderness Preservation System Research Articles

Use of the noise-free interval (NFI) metric to assess the disturbances of airborne vessel noise at Glacier Bay National Park

Alaska's Glacier Bay National Park preserves the seventh largest unit of the National Wilderness Preservation System, encompassing 2.6 million acres. Natural acoustic environments are significant to many of the unit's fundamental resources and values. Since 2001, the National Park Service has inventoried acoustic environments of Alaskan parks. One purpose is to document every noise-free interval (NFI) observed. NFI is defined as the time between human-generated noise disturbances. Aggregate properties of NFIs describe fragmentation of acoustic environments by noise. Median NFI estimated at parks in Alaska to date range from < 3 minutes to 16.7 hours, similar to other Arctic sites (0.5 to 13.0 hours, Stinchcomb et al. 2020). For the Glacier Bay Marine Management Plan Environmental Assessment, a geometric NFI model was developed using automatic identification system (AIS) derived vessel tracks. The NFI simulation results, along with NFI data from acoustic monitoring at the park, was then utilized to assess how changes to vessel quotas and vessel management strategies would potentially affect the NFI throughout the park. This paper will discuss the estimation and use of the NFI metric in protected natural areas, along with NFI modeling methods utilized for an environmental assessment at Glacier Bay.

U.S. wilderness in the 21st century: A scoping review of wilderness visitor use management research from 2000 to 2020

Now over twenty years into the 21st century, it is suggested that we are entering a new era of wilderness visitor use management (VUM). Yet, we lack a recent review of the literature assessing the latest research trends to advance wilderness VUM in a meaningful way. Accordingly, this research serves as both a review of the last twenty years of U.S. wilderness VUM research and a launching point into the next era. Our assessment adds to several previous benchmarks that demonstrate the progress of wilderness VUM research. This review evaluates trends in methodologies and themes of inquiry specific to VUM research in federally-designated wilderness over the past twenty years. The findings inform our discussion on emergent wilderness values and relevancy, approaches and settings of research, the evolving aspects of VUM in the wilderness, and the need for the synthesis of research across the National Wilderness Preservation System.

Blazing a Path to Wilderness: A Case Study of Impact Litigation Through the Lens of Legislative History

Litigation can be a catalyst for legislation. Legislative history can reveal just how influential litigation is. The legislative history of the laws to designate wilderness in the 1980s provides an object lesson. It demonstrates that litigation both pushed Congress to act and shaped the legislation Congress enacted. This is especially true of the watershed year of 1984. That year, Congress enacted more wilderness laws and added more wilderness areas to the National Wilderness Preservation System in more states than in any other year. The legislative history of the 1984 wilderness laws embedded in bills, hearings, committee meetings, committee reports, and floor proceedings, in conjunction with the legislative history of the various wilderness bills and laws considered, rejected, and passed from 1979 through 1983, reveal the significant impact a particular lawsuit had on Congress in 1984 and beyond. Specifically, a lawsuit grounded in the National Environmental Policy Act, taking advantage of a powerful precedent, prompted the preservation of the wilderness character of millions of acres of public land. To be precise: The lawsuit impelled Congress to designate more than 9.171 million acres in twenty-three states as wilderness from 1984 through 1989. Of that number, more than 7.335 million acres are managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture through the Forest Service; more than 1.835 million acres are managed by the U.S. Department of the Interior through the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service. This article uses legislative history to demonstrate how a strategic lawsuit sparked congressional action. It traces the litigation engendered by the Forest Service’s decision regarding roadless areas in national forests and the evolution of Congress’s response to that litigation, from the first lawsuit filed in 1979 to the last filed in 1983. In the process, it shows how legislative history can illuminate the underlying causes and policy choices that lead to legislation.

Protected area stewardship in the Anthropocene: integrating science, law, and ethics to evaluate proposals for ecological restoration in wilderness

Every year, the four federal agencies that manage designated wilderness in the United States receive proposals to implement small‐ and large‐scale ecological restorations within the National Wilderness Preservation System. The combination of climate change with other landscape stressors is driving ecological restoration to be one of the single most important, challenging, and potentially litigious wilderness stewardship issues. In addition, different stakeholders may have strongly divergent views about what the right decision should be, and decisions need to go beyond routine technical and scientific analyses to incorporate a broader range of legal and ethical considerations. We present a framework based on a comprehensive, structured set of scientific, legal, and ethical questions to guide the evaluation of proposals for ecological restoration and other types of ecological intervention in wilderness. This framework of questions is a voluntary tool designed to increase communication and transparency among scientists, managers, and interested publics regarding the trade‐offs and uncertainties of ecological restoration, and promote informed public deliberation in managing the public resource of wilderness.

Mapping threats to wilderness character in the National Wilderness Preservation System

The National Wilderness Preservation System in the United States provides the greatest level of protection for the ecological and social values of lands held in trust for future generations. Although designated wilderness is the cornerstone of the US conservation portfolio, designation alone doesn't assure the protection of these areas, which are degraded by threats both inside and external to the area. This paper describes new methods for quantifying the location and cumulative magnitude of threats to wilderness, allowing agency managers and the public to evaluate whether the legal mandate from the 1964 Wilderness Act to “preserve wilderness character” is being upheld. These new methods have also been used in developing wilderness stewardship plans and analyzing the potential effects of proposed projects that would degrade wilderness character. The methods described here were developed and tested in seven wildernesses in a variety of ecological, geographic, and administrative settings, and are directly applicable to evaluating threats and improving the management of all 110 million acres of designated wilderness in the United States, as well as all areas that are increasingly recognized internationally as wilderness.

Proposed Release of Wilderness Study Areas in Montana (USA) Would Demote the Conservation Status of Nationally-Valuable Wildlands

Wildlands are increasingly lost to human development. Conservation scientists repeatedly call for protecting the remaining wildlands and expanding the land area protected in reserves. Despite these calls, conservation reserves can be eliminated through legislation that demotes their conservation status. For example, legislation introduced to the Congress of the United States recently would demote 29 Wilderness Study Areas (WSAs) from the protections afforded by their existing status. The proposed legislation suggests that the 29 areas are not suitable for a promotion and future inclusion in the National Wilderness Preservation System based on decades-old local evaluations. Local evaluations, notwithstanding, it may be important to consider the value of lands from a national perspective. Without a national perspective, local evaluations alone may lead to overlooking the national significance of lands. With this in mind, I used five qualities of wildland value (wildness, intactness of night sky, lack of human-generated noises, intactness of mammals, and intactness of mammal carnivores of conservation concern) to compare the 29 WSAs to all national parks and wilderness areas located within the contiguous United States. The pool of 29 WSAs was similar to the pool of national parks and wilderness areas with respect to the five qualities assessed, and some of the WSAs were characterized by higher values than most of national parks and wilderness areas. This analysis demonstrates the national significance of the WSAs targeted for demotion of their existing conservation status. Such an approach could be used in future land management legislation and planning to ensure that a national perspective on conservation value is brought to bear on decisions facing federally-managed lands.

Manipulating the wild: a survey of restoration and management interventions in U.S. wilderness

Landscape scale restoration is a common management intervention used around the world to combat ecological degradation. For wilderness managers in the United States, the decision to intervene is complicated by the Wilderness Act's legal mandate to preserve wilderness character and demonstrate managerial restraint (16 U.S.C. § 1131–1136). We assessed the frequency and type of management interventions, specifically actions to manage ecosystems, that have occurred in the National Wilderness Preservation System between 2011 and 2015, including the specific type of intervention, the methods used, the project proponent, and the factors that influenced the decision to act. We sent an online survey to staff members at 527 wilderness units from four federal agencies that manage wilderness and found that management interventions occurred in 37% of wildernesses sampled (n = 210). The greatest frequency of interventions occurred in the National Park Service (75%), and the three most common interventions were vegetation treatments (46%), wildfire (35%), and wildlife restoration projects (18%). Our findings point to a need for greater transparency about information on management interventions. We recommend creating an interagency database to track information on management interventions in wilderness to better understand which actions are occurring and why; such a database could help inform wilderness stewardship decisions while demonstrating best practices for ecological restorations implemented within the constraints of the Wilderness Act.

The US Wilderness Managers Survey: Charting a Path for the Future

The Wilderness Manager Survey (WMS) was developed in 2014 to support interagency strategic planning for the National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS) and asked managers about their perceived threats to the NWPS, the need for science information to support decisionmaking, the need for education and training, and the most important problems for managers in the future. The WMS was administered during Feb. 24 to May 19, 2014, to wilderness managers in the four federal agencies who manage the lands of the NWPS, and 368 wilderness managers responded. The important external and internal threats as perceived by managers for the NWPS for the next 20 years were the following: the lack of political and financial support for wilderness protection and management, invasive exotic plant or animal species, disconnected urban audiences unaware of wilderness, adjacent land management and incompatible uses, and legislation designating wilderness that included compromised natural conditions or incompatible special provisions for management.

The Next 50 Years: Opportunities for Diversifying the Ecological Representation of the National Wilderness Preservation System within the Contiguous United States

The Next 50 Years: Opportunities for Diversifying the Ecological Representation of the National Wilderness Preservation System within the Contiguous United States

Allocating Untreated “Controls” in the National Wilderness Preservation System as a Climate Adaptation Strategy: A Case Study from the Flathead National Forest, Montana

Abstract Climate change challenges traditional strategies to conserve native biological diversity while sustaining ecosystem services. Several key climate adaptation frameworks call for adoption of experimental management whereby different strategies are viewed as experimental treatments requiring untreated controls by which to compare alternative approaches. At the same time, a variety of traditional conservation approaches (e.g., protecting land as connected network of reserves) continue to be emphasized as critical climate adaptation strategies, assuming that reserves are sufficiently representative of ecological diversity. Lands within the National Wilderness Preservation System could be used as untreated control landscapes while also serving as cores within protected area networks. The value of NWPS lands to serve as both untreated controls and representative ecological reserves will require maximizing ecological diversity within protected areas. Here, we assessed ecological representation across wil...

The world’s largest wilderness protection network after 50 years: An assessment of ecological system representation in the U.S. National Wilderness Preservation System

Protected areas, such as wilderness, form the foundation of most strategies to conserve biological diversity. However, the success of protected areas in achieving conservation goals depends partly on how well ecological diversity is represented in a network of designated lands. We examined how well the world’s largest highly-protected conservation network—the U.S. National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS)—currently represents ecological systems found on federal lands in the contiguous United States and how ecological system representation has accumulated over the 50-year tenure of the Wilderness Act (passed in 1964 and giving the U.S. Congress authority to establish wilderness areas). Although the total area of NWPS has risen fairly steadily since 1964, the diversity of ecological systems accumulated in wilderness areas (436 ecological systems) reached an asymptote 30years ago that is well below the total pool of ecological systems available (553) on federal lands. Thus, NWPS currently under-represents ecological system diversity. Additionally, only 113 ecological systems are represented at more than 20% of federal land area. As the designation of new wilderness areas becomes more difficult, it is important to increase the ecological representation of those areas to achieve greater protection of biological diversity. Over the next 50years of the Wilderness Act, federal land-management agencies and the U.S. Congress could increase the ecological diversity of wilderness areas by prioritizing under-represented ecological systems in new wilderness legislation.

Keeping it wild: Mapping wilderness character in the United States

A GIS-based approach is developed to identify the state of wilderness character in US wilderness areas using Death Valley National Park (DEVA) as a case study. A set of indicators and measures are identified by DEVA staff and used as the basis for developing a flexible and broadly applicable framework to map wilderness character using data inputs selected by park staff. Spatial data and GIS methods are used to map the condition of four qualities of wilderness character: natural, untrammelled, undeveloped, and solitude or primitive and unconfined recreation. These four qualities are derived from the US 1964 Wilderness Act and later developed by Landres et al. (2008a) in “Keeping it Wild: An Interagency Strategy to Monitor Trends in Wilderness Character Across the National Wilderness Preservation System.” Data inputs are weighted to reflect their importance in relation to other data inputs and the model is used to generate maps of each of the four qualities of wilderness character. The combined map delineates the range of quality of wilderness character in the DEVA wilderness revealing the majority of wilderness character to be optimal quality with the best areas in the northern section of the park. This map will serve as a baseline for monitoring change in wilderness character and for evaluating the spatial impacts of planning alternatives for wilderness and backcountry stewardship plans. The approach developed could be applied to any wilderness area, either in the USA or elsewhere in the world.

Contemporary Politics of Wilderness Preservation

This paper explores the issues and the arguments in deciding whether to include tracts of federal lands in the National Wilderness Preservation System. It shows how the issues and debates have changed over the years since the System was created by the Wilderness Act of 1964.

Wilderness forever: Howard Zahniser and the path to the Wilderness Act

Review: Wilderness Forever: Howard Zahniser and the Path to the Wilderness Act By Mark Harvey Reviewed by Byron Anderson Northern Illinois University, USA Mark Harvey. Wilderness Forever: Howard Zahniser and the Path to the Wilderness Act. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2005. xviii, 325 pp. ISBN: 0-295-98532-1 (cloth). US$35.00. Acid-free and 90 percent recycled from at least 50 percent post-consumer waste. One of the most visionary and successful advocates of wilderness in the twentieth century is a person few Americans have any knowledge of today. Howard Zahniser (1906-1964) was a bureaucrat, editor, manager and lobbyist who lived most of his working life in Washington, DC. In 1945, he accepted the executive secretary position with the Wilderness Society, and became a consummate manager and institution builder, who helped turn a small group of naturalists into an important conservation lobby. During his tenure, the Society's membership increased ten-fold to over 25,000 members. His legacy included the growth of nationally protected wilderness from nine million acres to the more than 100 million acres that now make up the National Wilderness Preservation System. To safeguard wilderness by law became his chief focus and life's work. Zahniser wanted to keep wilderness as wild as possible, but faced fierce opposition from resort developers and commodity industries, including mining, timber, and petroleum. The book details many of his battles -- for example, his successful efforts to expand the Grand Teton National Park, the preservation of the Boundary Waters area, and his triumph over the proposed Echo Park Dam -- as well as battles that resulted in compromise or failure. Opponents of wilderness preservation frequently labeled such projects as elitist, that is, preserving pristine lands for use by a few. He fought hard to gain acceptance of the idea that wilderness was for all to use, and he had no wish to exclude anyone. He merely sought to preserve such areas for those who chose to go. By insisting that consumption and commodity uses need not be reduced in order to make room for wilderness, he gained many needed allies in the efforts to preserve designated areas. Zahniser loved crafting language, a role that played well in his editorial duties of the Society's magazine, Living Wilderness, as well as in his many letters, opinion pieces and legislative drafts. He was able to turn out comprehensive statements on the value of wilderness during a time of enormous post-war growth and development in the country. He loved the

The National Wildlife Refuges: Coordinating a Conservation System Through Law

Review: The National Wildlife Refuges: Coordinating a Conservation System Through Law By Robert L. Fischman Reviewed by Ryder W. Miller San Francisco, USA Robert L. Fischman. The National Wildlife Refuges: Coordinating a Conservation System Through Law. Washington, DC: Island Press: 2003. Printed on recycled acid-free paper. 277 pages. Robert L. Fischman, a professor at the Indiana University School of Law- Bloomington, details and interprets a vast body of national law concerning the National Wildlife Refuge system. He promotes National Wildlife Refuge law as an international model for sustainable land use, because preservation is not the primary purpose of land management internationally. Other land management systems like the National Park Service and National Wilderness Preservation system focus on preservation and recreational use, rather than sustainable resource extraction. These latter systems “grew out of peculiarly American visions of monumental, pristine, uninhabited nature that are not widely shared by the rest of the world. . . In contrast, the Refuge System’s mandate is founded on more global accepted principles of ecology (biological integrity, diversity, and environmental health criteria) and sustainable development (permit use compatible with the conservation mission). Therefore, the Refuge System deserves special attention and support as a model for international conservation” (p. 210). Fischman goes into detail concerning the various laws, statutes and mandates that direct the management of the National Wildlife Refuges as well as the history of the influence of hunters on the system, and the system’s later adaptation to the call of growing environmental concern. A major focus of the book is President Clinton’s impact on the Refuge System, The National Wildlife Refuge System Improvement Act of 1997. Earlier chapters set the stage, explaining the legislative principles, in order for the reader to understand the 1997 Act’s significance. There are also chapters about the major refuges in Alaska (which doubled the system’s holdings when they were formed in the 1980’s), as well as oil and mining concerns. Each refuge has its own history and legal framework, but there has been systemic (or organic) legislation to tie the system together. The slow-going work is filled with legalese, but is understandable. Fischman manages to interpret National Wildlife Refuge law for the layman.

A Wilderness Apprenticeship: Olaus Murie in Canada, 1914–15 and 1917

In late May 1914, a large, gray Peterborough freight canoe carrying four men outfitted for a summer of scientific field work cleared the bank of Quebec's Bell River, 185 miles east of Cochrane, Ontario, and entered the northbound current heading for Hudson Bay., Among the four was Olaus J. Murie, a twenty-five-year-old American biologist. Murie's fellow travelers were the expedition leader, W. E. Clyde Todd, and Native American guides Paul Commanda and Jack (Jocko) Couchai. Todd, a curator of birds at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which sponsored the expedition, described the guides as Objibwa Indians of ability and intelligence.2 Although professionally unknown at the time, Murie became one of the world's premier biologists and a major environmental spokesperson. He later conducted seminal field studies of caribou and other faunal species in Alaska, performed a comprehensive scientific assessment of the wapiti or American elk in Wyoming's Jackson Hole and surrounding areas, and pioneered in the study of many other mammals and birds before his retirement in 1945. Murie played a local role in the expansion of Grand Teton National Park and later, as president and director of the Wilderness Society, worked to preserve a number of wild areas in the contiguous United States and Alaska including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He also extensively promoted and lobbied for passage of a national wilderness preservation system, which Congress established in the Wilderness Act of 1964, the year following Murie's death.3 Murie became a prolific author and award-winning conservationist. He wrote and illustrated numerous books including Alaska-Yukon Caribou and Fauna of the Aleutians andAlaska Peninsula, scientific monographs based on his fieldwork. The National Wildlife Society judged his comprehensive wapiti study, The Elk of North America, the outstanding publication on terrestrial wildlife in 1951. Murie wrote and illustrated A Field Guide to Animal Tracks in the acclaimed Roger Tory Peterson Field Guide Series. He shared authorship of Wapiti Wilderness with his wife, Margaret E. Murie, who also completed her husband's memoir, Journeys to the Far North, after his death. Writer and historian J. Frank Dobie personally selected

Using GIS to identify under-represented ecosystems in the National Wilderness Preservation System in the USA

Wilderness designation continues to be a contentious effort and must be fully justified even in wealthy countries such as the USA. An important consideration in setting priorities for additional designations of Wilderness is to ensure that under-represented ecosystems are protected. The utility of Geographic Information Systems in performing this task is illustrated using data on ecoregions and areas in the National Wilderness Preservation System to determine the relative protection currently afforded to different ecoregions in the continental USA. We find that 23 of the 35 ecoregions have less than 1% of their land area protected as Wilderness, and 7 of the 35 have no land protected as Wilderness whatsoever. While much of the land with little protection is in areas dominated by private land ownership in the mid-west and southeast, a surprisingly large amount of land in the Intermountain states of Nevada and Utah, which is in public ownership, is substantially under-represented in the National Wilderness Preservation System as well. The implications of this analysis for wilderness allocation strategies are detailed. The technique illustrated in this paper is a useful aid in designing protected area strategies in countries throughout the world.

The Oregon Omnibus Wilderness Act of 1978 as a Component of the Endangered American Wilderness Act of 1978, Public Law 95-237

Introduction This paper explores the political process and motivations behind passage of the Oregon Omnibus Wilderness Act of 1978 (OOWA). Through an analysis of the parties involved, a perception of values as a policy determinant for wilderness emerges. Oregon Omnibus Wilderness Act was a component of the larger national law, Endangered American Wilderness Act of 1978 (EAWA). EAWA provided further definition to the original Wilderness Act of 1964, calling for significant expansion of the National Wilderness Preservation System in the western United States. Following the Eastern Wilderness Act of 1975, The Endangered American Wilderness Act of 1978.. .extended.. .liberal policy on wilderness eligibility to the western national forests.' This question of wilderness eligibility was the focus of value conflict during the public hearings and congressional debates prior to passage of the EAWA, which included the lands in the Oregon Omnibus bill.

Wilderness Visitor Management: Diversity and Agency Policies

Abstract Since its inception in 1964, the National Wilderness Preservation System has been managed without formal coordination among its three major agencies--the Forest Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Because of the different missions and guiding philosophies of these agencies, management guidelines for wilderness also vary. Regulation of visitor activities within wilderness units well illustrates this diversity. In 1978, a nationwide survey of all units within the Wilderness System revealed very substantial differences among agencies in their regulation of visitor activities. By subordinating management styles to agency goals, each agency has emphasized some of the Wilderness Act's objectives and deemphasized others. This current diversity provides a desirable range of opportunities for activities appropriate to wilderness use, but coordination of agency efforts seems desirable and would enhance efforts for attainment of all Wilderness System objectives.

Overview of the National Wilderness Preservation System

Overview of the National Wilderness Preservation System