ABSTRACT

National Park Service (NPS) managers across the country are confronted with increasingly complex and challenging issues that require a broad-based understanding of the status and trends of each park’s natural resources as a basis for making decisions, working with other agencies, and communicating with the public to protect park natural systems and native species (Natural Resource Challenge). Mandated to preserve and protect park resources for and through future generations, park managers must know the current condition of park natural resources and understand how they are changing over time in order to be successful. To address this need for reliable, scientifi cally based information for resource protection, the NPS has implemented a strategy to inventory and monitor key natural resources. This strategy is called the Inventory and Monitoring (I&M) Program and includes three major components: (1) completion of basic natural resource inventories upon which monitoring efforts can be based; (2) development of experimental prototype monitoring programs in a selected number of parks to evaluate alternative monitoring designs and strategies; and (3) implementation of ecological monitoring of critical parameters (i.e., “vital signs”) in all parks with signifi cant natural resources.