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Results for “Parks Stewardship Forum”

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5 recordsLinked to original sources
USGS2025

Scientific opportunities in the National Landscape Conservation System

The National Landscape Conservation System consists of unique and beautiful places across America’s landscapes where identified resources and values are protected and science is highlighted. The mission of the National Landscape Conservation System (NLCS), which is managed by the Bureau of Land Management and is often referred to as the agency’s National Conservation Lands, is to conserve, protect, and restore nationally significant landscapes for their cultural, ecological, and scientific values. This clear inclusion of science in the NLCS mission sets the stage for individual units to serve as places of learning, teaching, discovery, and innovation. Science is an integral part of managing the National Conservation Lands, and science conducted within and across the more than 900 units that make up the NLCS can inform and influence conservation and public land management well beyond its boundaries. Here, we highlight seven core aspects of National Conservation Lands that present valuable science opportunities: (1) the scientific values for which individual units are designated; (2) the many other resources, objects, and values within units; (3) the value of units as “control” sites for understanding the effects of activities such as mineral extraction that commonly occur elsewhere on multiple-use public lands but are often prohibited within National Conservation Lands; (4) the value of units for studying the effects of activities such as recreation that regularly occur and may be intensified on National Conservation Lands; (5) the high visibility of units, which draws strong interest and engagement from scientists, partners, and the public; (6) the functioning of the units as a network managed for a common purpose, which provides an opportunity to explore cross-cutting science questions across widely varying contexts and geographies; and (7) the opportunities units provide to promote and apply Indigenous Knowledge to scientific research to manage natural and cultural resources. Because of all of these characteristics, National Conservation Lands can serve as hubs for basic and applied science that can inform management of all public lands and resources into the future. We highlight these science opportunities through examples from existing units and suggest two actions that could help further science activities and impact on National Conservation Lands.

Parks Stewardship Forum↗
USGS2020

A new decision support tool for collaborative adaptive vegetation management in northern Great Plains national parks

National Park Service (NPS) units in the northern Great Plains (NGP) were established to preserve and interpret the history of America, protect and showcase unusual geology and paleontology, and provide a home for vanishing large wildlife. A unifying feature among these national parks, monuments, and historic sites is mixed-grass prairie, which not only provides background scenery but is the very foundation of many park missions. As recognition of the prairie’s importance to park fundamental resources and values has grown, so too has the realization that invasive plants threaten these values by reducing native species diversity, altering food webs, and marring the visitor experience. Parks manage invasive species despite uncertainties in treatment effectiveness because management cannot wait for research to provide definitive answers. Under these circumstances, adaptive management (AM) is an appropriate approach. In the NGP, we formed a collaborative adaptive vegetation management team to apply AM towards reducing invasive species (with a focus on exotic annual grasses) and improving native vegetation conditions. In our AM framework, the team uses a Bayesian model built from NPS Inventory & Monitoring and Fire Effects monitoring data and experimental results to predict the effects of management actions on park management units, according to those units’ vegetation condition and management history. These predictions inform management decisions, which are then applied.

Parks Stewardship Forum↗
USGS2017

National Park Service Vegetation Mapping Inventory Program: Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve Vegetation Mapping Project

The National Park Service, Natural Resource Stewardship and Science office in Fort Collins, Colorado, publishes a range of reports that address natural resource topics. These reports are of interest and applicability to a broad audience in the National Park Service and others in natural resource management, including scientists, conservation and environmental constituencies, and the public. The Natural Resource Report Series is used to disseminate comprehensive information and analysis about natural resources and related topics concerning lands managed by the National Park Service. The series supports the advancement of science, informed decision-making, and the achievement of the National Park Service mission. The series also provides a forum for presenting lengthier results that may not be accepted by publications with page limitations. All manuscripts in the series receive the appropriate level of peer review to ensure that the information is scientifically credible, technically accurate, appropriately written for the intended audience, and designed and published in a professional manner. This report received formal peer review by subject-matter experts whose background and expertise put them on par technically and scientifically with the authors of the information. The peer review was led according to the Fundamental Science Practices of the U.S. Geological Survey. Views, statements, findings, conclusions, recommendations, and data in this report do not necessarily reflect views and policies of the National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. Mention of trade names or commercial products does not constitute endorsement or recommendation for use by the U.S. Government. This report is available in digital format from the Gulf Coast Network website and the Natural Resource Publications Management website.

Louisiana↗
USGS2008

Naturalness and beyond: Protected area stewardship in an era of global environmental change

For most large U.S. parks and wilderness areas, enabling legislation and management policy call for preservation of these protected areas unimpaired in perpetuity. Central to the notions of protection, preservation, and unimpairment has been the concept of maintaining “naturalness,” a condition imagined by many to persist over time in the absence of human intervention. As will be discussed below in more detail, the goal of naturalness has been codified in legislation and protected area policy and built into agency culture. For much of the 20th century, the adequacy of naturalness as the guiding concept for stewardship of protected areas remained largely unchallenged. Scientists, managers, and conservationists assumed that natural conditions could be preserved and that doing so would assure long-term conservation of biodiversity and ecosystems within protected area boundaries.

George Wright Society Forum↗
USGS2014

Connecting the dots: a collaborative USGS-NPS effort to expand the utility of monitoring data

The Natural Resource Challenge (National Park Service 1999) was a call to action. It constituted a mandate for monitoring based on the twin premises that (1) natural resources in national parks require active management and stewardship if we are to protect them from gradual degradation, and (2) we cannot protect what we do not understand. The intent of the challenge was embodied in its original description: We must expand existing inventory programs and develop efficient ways to monitor the vital signs of natural systems. We must enlist others in the scientific community to help, and also facilitate their inquiry. Managers must have and apply this information to preserve our natural resources. In this article, we report on ongoing collaborative work between the National Park Service (NPS) and the US Geological Survey (USGS) that seeks to add to our scientific understanding of the ecological processes operating behind vital signs monitoring data. The ultimate goal of this work is to provide insights that can facilitate an understanding of the systems and identify potential opportunities for active stewardship by NPS managers (Bennetts et al. 2007; Mitchell et al. 2014). The bulk of the work thus far has involved Acadia and Rocky Mountain national parks, but there are plans for extending the work to additional parks. Our story stats with work designed to consider ways of assessing the status and condition of natural resources and the potential for historical or ongoing influences of human activities. In the 1990s, the concept of "biotic integrity" began to take hold as an aspiration for developing quantitative indices describing how closely the conditions at a site resemble those found at pristine, unimpacted sites. Quantitative methods for developing indices of biotic integrity (IBIs) and elaborations of that idea (e.g., ecological integrity) have received considerable attention and application of these methods to natural resources has become widespread (Karr 1991; Barbour et al. 1999; Stoddard et al. 2008). Despite widespread use, many questions remain about how metrics are combined to form effective indices and about how to interpret both. Scientists and natural resource specialists within NPS and USGS have joined forces to critique the current analysis methods, with the collaboration involving the Rocky Mountain and Northeast Temperate NPS Inventory and Monitoring (I & M) networks, along with others, and USGS scientists from the National Wetlands Research Center and Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. Funding that initiated the project was from a joint-partnership fund managed by the USGS Ecosystems Program for National Park Monitoring research and the work was focused at Acadia National Park and Rocky Mountain National Park. Here we present synopses of two major issues addressed by the group.

The George Wright Forum↗