Channel Islands: Where the Park Service's Long-Term Monitoring Began

A crisis of information

In 1978 the National Parks Conservation Association surveyed managers of 203 park units about threats. Congress then asked the Park Service for its own assessment. The resulting State of the Parks: 1980 found more than half the threats came from outside park boundaries — development, air pollution, roads — and that 75% were not documented by research. Research funding had only reached 2% of the budget. Very few parks had the baseline data to detect change. The prescription: inventory every park, then monitor. In January 1981 the Service promised Congress a resources management plan for every park.

A park worth protecting

The Channel Islands, off southern California, were little valued at first: in 1937 a Park Service official, inspecting from a boat, found them "barren." But biologist T. D. A. Cockerell, who had published 3,904 papers and was studying the islands' bees, snails and endemic species, urged the Service to take them. President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed Channel Islands National Monument — just Anacapa and Santa Barbara islands — in April 1938.

The kelp that got away

A 1949 proclamation added a mile of ocean around the islands, and the Service banned commercial kelp harvest there. California sued, and on May 15, 1978, the Supreme Court ruled the submerged lands belonged to the state. The next day, Superintendent Bill Ehorn watched from Santa Barbara Island as a kelp cutter leveled the underwater forest. "The only way we're going to [protect this park] is with science," he told Gary Davis — evidence he could take to court and win.

Writing monitoring into law

Ehorn sought national park status. A House staffer warned that "monitoring" would never get funded — it wasn't exciting research. So the idea was framed as repeated inventories with reports. The act creating Channel Islands National Park on March 5, 1980, required an inventory of all land and marine species, "their population dynamics, and probable trends," and recommendations for better protection — reports every two years for ten years. For the first time, Congress mandated inventory and monitoring in a national park. Davis arrived in July 1980.

Building the program

Fellow Park Service scientists first dismissed the design as not "real research." Davis won them over with a clear division of labor: scientists would run 3–5-year design studies to choose what to measure and how; park staff would then carry out the monitoring forever, as routine operations.

The step-down plan: each row lists the actions needed to reach the goal above it. NPS.

• March 1981: a committee of the Park Service, NOAA, BLM and California Fish and Game set the target — detect a 40% change, a "pragmatic compromise between cost and risk."
• Indicators: experts chose species by legal status, endemism, harvest, dominance, abundance and public appeal — 60 for kelp forests alone (15 plants, 33 invertebrates, 12 fish).
• Handbooks: each protocol was written up so data stayed comparable despite staff turnover. 14 protocols were planned, from pinnipeds and seabirds to tide pools, kelp forests, weather and visitors; by 1991 only 4 were running. Kelp forests came first, in summer 1982.
• Results used: monitoring showed rabbit removal on Santa Barbara Island worked, changed visitor briefings to reduce tidepool trampling, and detected an alarming abalone decline.

"Vital signs"

Jogging with Ehorn and the dive team's physician, Davis found a metaphor: monitor an ecosystem like a doctor checks a patient's pulse, temperature and blood pressure — measure over time, learn the normal range, and spot trouble early. Resource managers became family doctors, rangers the EMTs, scientists the medical researchers. The metaphor stuck — so well that in the late 1990s the Worldwatch Institute's trademark on "vital signs" briefly made it "the program formerly known as vital signs."

The whole park staff took part, from interpreters explaining controversial actions to maintenance workers reporting early warnings. "We put the flag up, we take the flag down, and we monitor what's going on in the park," Davis said. The program lasted because it worked.

Sources

Based on "I&M Administrative History: Channel Islands," 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. The source spells Congressman Robert Lagomarsino's name "Lagormarsino".