PARENT SESSION
Poster Session 35: Restoration Ecology.
Thursday, August 5 Presentations from 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM, Exhibit Hall A 1.
Initial steps in developing a long-term vegetation monitoring plan for northern Great Plains national parks.
Symstad, Amy*,1, Licht, Dan2, 1 U.S. Geological Survey, Keystone, SD, USA2 National Park Service, Keystone, SD, USA
ABSTRACT- In 1998 Congress directed the National Park Service (NPS) to conduct baseline natural resource inventories and to implement a long-term monitoring program in NPS units (National Parks Omnibus Management Act of 1998). The intent of Congress was for the agency to monitor the ecological health of the parks. To implement the initiative, the NPS delineated 32 networks of parks, one of which is the Northern Great Plains Network (NGPN). Each of these networks is charged with determining specific indicators of ecosystem health and the protocols to monitor them. This process requires (1) synthesizing information about the current state of park ecosystems, (2) understanding past, present, and future stressors that impact ecosystem health, (3) using ecological concepts to determine indicators that can be feasibly monitored to track changes in the ecosystems, and (4) developing specific monitoring protocols for each indicator chosen. Here we present the results of the initial stages of this process for the vegetation component of the NGPN's parks. Specifically, we show that the current health of the vegetation varies widely among the 13 parks in the NGPN, with some parks having very little native vegetation and others having their native vegetation relatively intact. Some anthropogenic stressors to park vegetation, such as altered fire regimes and invasive species and their control, are shared by all parks in the NGPN. Other stressors, such as altered hydrological regimes and lack of colonization sources due to habitat fragmentation, are likely to have major impacts on the vegetation of only a few parks. Based on these stressors and a preliminary ecological model of the parks' ecosystems, three indicators have been suggested for long-term monitoring: plant community composition; plant community diversity and distribution (landscape structure); and rare plant populations.
Key words: ecosystem health indicators, long-term vegetation monitoring, national parks, northern Great Plains