I&M Administrative History: A Herculean Undertaking

A chapter of the Park Service's administrative history of its Inventory & Monitoring (I&M) program, by Alice Wondrak Biel, writer-editor, NPS Inventory & Monitoring Division.

A new associate director

Two months before the Evison Report appeared, in March 1987, F. Eugene "Gene" Hester replaced Richard Briceland as Associate Director for Natural Resources. Unusually for the time he came from outside the Park Service — an 18-year veteran of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, most recently its deputy director. He brought a strategic approach — professionalising resource management and implementing I&M systematically — where personalities had often shaped priorities more than policy.

What the parks knew

In fall 1987 Hester announced work on I&M standards and guidelines — to become NPS-75 — and a survey of existing I&M activities. In spring 1988 managers of 183 park units answered a questionnaire on whether they had inventories of biological, geophysical and chemical resources and human use, whether they kept them current, monitored the resources, had ecological models, and kept records on computers.

The raw results came out in early 1989 without analysis. Anyone who looked found what they expected: of 179 possible inventory topics, more than half the parks had information on only 18 — the best were topographic maps (83 percent), endangered species (71 percent) and bird checklists (70 percent); vegetation maps scraped in at 52 percent. Fewer parks updated or monitored what they had. Between 1 and 13 percent had ecological models, and for most topics less than 10 percent of the data were on computers; the best, digital air-temperature records, reached 24 percent.

Frustrated that the survey asked only whether information existed, Assateague Island's staff wrote a 200-page gap analysis of their own. A separate survey, the Natural Resources Assessment and Action Program (NRAAP) from Director Mott's 12-Point Plan, asked parks which of 6 resource categories and 30 subcategories they had and in what condition; in every major category, up to half the parks with a resource said their data on it were inadequate.

The Hester Task Force

In 1989 Hester assembled a group of Park Service staff — including specialists in programme management and budget analysis — to turn the Evison group's vision into a working plan. The Hester Task Force (HTF) reported in April 1990.

It grounded I&M in the Management Policies of December 1988, which called for baseline inventories monitored "at regular intervals to detect or predict changes." Its long-term goal was "the development of monitoring programs in all parks with significant natural resources" — 225 units at the time — so that any park, whatever its size or budget, could have the science it needed.

The gap was enormous: before designing monitoring a park needed models of its natural systems, and only a handful of parks had a handful of models. The HTF proposed a ten-year plan:

• Inventories for all 225 units, FY1992–FY1999, at $1.2–16 million a year, starting with the parks nearest completion as models, while a panel of experts assessed inventories and built conceptual ecosystem models ($100,000–740,000 a year, FY1991–1995). Only "a very limited amount" of money was available for inventories themselves.
• Monitoring in pilot parks: two new programmes a year from FY1992 to FY1995, eight in all, preferring experienced parks in different bioregions — $1.5 million in FY1992, rising to $8.9 million by FY2000, plus overhead and infrastructure. From FY1995, designs for another 20 percent of the 225 parks each year.
• Clusters of small parks. Task force member Phil Brueck, superintendent of the 16,000-acre Prince William Forest Park, saw that small parks lacked the staff and money for monitoring alone, but together could match a large park. The report called for "at least one cluster of smaller parks" — the first official mention of the network idea that would come to define the whole programme. A November update proposed nine "Prairie Parks" in the Midwest.
• Data management — a servicewide system, to be designed from FY1993, with no cost estimate.

In all, inventories would cost about $68 million over ten years, and a full programme about $200 million a year — when the whole Park Service appropriation in 1990 was about $769 million. The HTF itself warned that actual budgets would force periodic rethinking.

Early money

Meanwhile a few parks got a little. In fiscal year 1988 the Park Service for the first time set aside $660,000 of Natural Resource Preservation Program money for systematic I&M rather than one-off projects. It went to pilot parks named in the Evison Report: Acadia, Channel Islands, Glacier, Great Smoky Mountains, Isle Royale, Olympic, and Sequoia and Kings Canyon.

Isle Royale used its share to relocate and database 447 old research plots and build a GIS. Above all, it gained a framework: before 1988, the park's Robert Krumenaker wrote, it "never used the phrase 'Inventory and Monitoring,'" yet it had an extensive monitoring programme that had "never been systematically planned, catalogued, nor critiqued, until now." Channel Islands built an integrated data system and GIS. Shoring up data may sound dull, but both reports had said to start by strengthening parks already doing I&M — and a one-time sum split among a few parks could only pay for finite projects.

Extinctions — or bad records?

There was also urgency. In 1987 the journal Nature published a short letter by William Newmark, a University of Michigan doctoral student, arguing that western national parks behaved like land-bridge islands, losing species faster than they gained them. From park sighting records and the literature for 14 western parks in the United States and Canada, he counted 42 extinctions and only three colonisations since the parks were established — Lassen Volcanic, he said, had lost 43 percent of its rabbits and hares, carnivores and hoofed mammals in 77 years — and concluded that nearly all were too small to keep their original mammals. The implication was shocking: the Park Service was failing its basic mandate to protect wildlife.

It landed amid the long "SLOSS" debate over whether a single large reserve or several small ones better preserves biodiversity.

Other researchers saw a different problem: not extinction but chaotic record-keeping. At a 1988 conference on research in California's national parks, James Quinn of UC Davis and Charles van Riper of Northern Arizona University's Cooperative Park Studies Unit argued that the "extinctions" mostly reflected poor inventories and inaccessible sighting records; on re-examination, no more than three of 39 apparent extinctions were real, and that the question could arise at all, for animals as popular as large mammals, showed something was badly wrong. Interviewing staff at 12 parks with a Forest Service biologist, they found confirmed recent sightings for 21 of Newmark's 39 cases. Comparing California parks' bird and mammal lists, they found no two parks recording data the same way.

In May 1991 Quinn and Tom Stohlgren, of the UC Davis Cooperative National Park Resources Studies Unit, scored the completeness of species inventories in 40 Western Region parks. At most a quarter had species inventories at least 95 percent complete; elsewhere knowledge was a patchwork of chance observations, unchecked range maps and 1930s surveys, and one park's herbarium was recorded as about 50 specimens in a cardboard box, location unknown. Small parks fared worst: of the parks with the biggest gaps, 81 percent covered less than 100 square miles — worrying, since small parks together may hold more of the system's biodiversity, and face more threats.

Inventory versus monitoring

In October 1991 Stohlgren brought these concerns to the I&M Advisory Committee (IMAC), a 14-member group of superintendents, scientists and specialists meeting twice a year, just as it chose the first four prototype monitoring parks. He argued that a small investment in inventorying many small parks would do more for conservation than large sums spent monitoring large, well-funded ones, and would bring parks up to the level of knowledge the public already assumed they had. His proposed pilot inventory programme would cost $65,000 a year for three years — a fraction of a monitoring programme.

With so little money, the two halves competed: in FY1992 about 32 percent of the budget went to inventories, and programme lead Gary Williams recalled someone redrawing "I&M" on a blackboard as a tiny "I" and a giant "M." Al Lovaas, the Alaska Region's chief scientist, warned that I&M struggled because it served the future while managers faced today's problems. Yet, as former Glacier superintendent Jeff Mow liked to say, the Park Service is "in the forever business."

The money problem

Funding never matched ambition. A November update found existing regional funds covered only 3 percent of expected inventory costs. I&M's first major allocation, $1.9 million in FY1992, came from Congress renewing and reallocating expiring project funds. In 1991 Krumenaker wrote in Ranger that the budget system rewarded short-term projects over long-term solutions.

"Planning without funding is just conversation," former director George Hartzog is said to have remarked. But with support from the top, momentum in the parks and about $2 million to start, I&M went ahead anyway.

The chapter says the fiscal year 1988 money went to eight pilot parks and names seven, counting Sequoia and Kings Canyon as one.

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Sources

• National Park Service, Inventory & Monitoring Division, I&M Administrative History: A Herculean Undertaking, by Alice Wondrak Biel — researchers outside the Park Service paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.