When Babbitt Moved the Scientists Out: Park Inventories and Monitoring, 1992–1999

The audit

A 1992 report by the Interior Department's Inspector General found the Park Service had let resources suffer by favoring visitors: a $477 million backlog of 4,700 projects to address known threats, while resource management got 8–10% of the budget and the rest went mostly to visitor programs.

Without inventory and monitoring, damage went unseen:

• After the Exxon Valdez spill, Alaska parks had no baseline to measure harm.
• Ammonia from a landfill leaked into Biscayne Bay for five years, undetected, reaching 1,000 times EPA-recommended levels.
• At Crater Lake, a 1989 survey found 130 bull trout in Sun Creek — down 96% from 3,000 in the last survey, 42 years earlier.

Even so, the new Inventory & Monitoring program, planned to get $4.4 million in 1993, was cut back to $1.9 million. The Inspector General noted that Park Service leaders, not Congress, chose how to divide their budget. The National Research Council added that the Service needed a legal mandate for science, independent science funding and supervision, and a chief scientist — with inventory and monitoring the "absolute minimum."

The National Biological Survey

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt chose another path: move the scientists out. When Congress would not act, he created the National Biological Survey by order in 1993, staffed with more than 1,800 people from other bureaus — about 1,300 from Fish and Wildlife, and roughly 170 positions and $20 million from the Park Service.

• Politics: after the 1994 elections, rumors spread that it would survey private land for endangered species. Babbitt renamed it a "Service" in 1995, then folded it into the U.S. Geological Survey as the Biological Resources Division in October 1996.
• People: scientists lost their support systems — Gary Davis could no longer dive at Channel Islands because the new bureau had no dive program.
• Parks: a 1996 survey found Park Service staff regularly getting science help fell from 49% to 19%; those who never got it rose from 11% to 32%. Babbitt's associate director, Mike Soukup, told him moving scientists away had weakened science in the parks.

Splitting the program

The Inventory & Monitoring program was divided:

• Biological inventories, such as vegetation mapping, went to the new bureau; soils, geology, water stayed.
• Davis argued that monitoring, once designed, is routine park operations, not research — so Channel Islands and Shenandoah kept theirs, and later programs would be designed by USGS scientists and then handed to the parks.

Ever since, the Park Service has avoided calling its monitoring "research." The program moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, in 1994.

Inventories, slowly

From 1993 to 1998 the program funded 560 inventories.

• Bibliographies of every park's scientific record came first.
• Base maps were done for 240 parks; soil surveys began in 41.
• About a quarter were water-quality reports compiled from the EPA's database.
• Vegetation mapping began at pilot parks — Assateague, Tuzigoot, Scotts Bluff, Great Smoky Mountains — grouped by the Forest Service's ecoregions. By 1998 projects had started in 20 parks and five were finished.

Bailey's ecoregions, the basis for grouping vegetation mapping and, later, monitoring networks.

The goal of 12 inventories for each of 250 parks in ten years proved far too ambitious. Inventories were projected to need about $109 million over a decade, peaking at $17 million in 1998; the program's budget that year was $6.3 million, about 37% of need.

Projected need versus actual appropriations for inventory and monitoring, 1992–1999. NPS.

At that pace, vegetation mapping would take 60 more years. By 1999, monitoring ran at only three parks and clusters beyond the first four prototypes, and hand-offs from USGS to the parks were proving harder than planned. The fix — a mandate to do science and money to do it — was still to come.

Sources

Based on "I&M Administrative History: Babbitt Flips the Table," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. This chapter is part of the Park Service's administrative history of its Inventory & Monitoring Division, researched and written by Alice Wondrak Biel, Writer-Editor, NPS Inventory & Monitoring Division. It draws on the Inspector General's 1992 audit, the National Research Council's Science and the National Parks (1992) and program records.