I&M Administrative History: Getting to Work

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.

Four prototype parks

In October 1991 the program's advisory committee (IMAC) chose the first four parks for prototype monitoring: Channel Islands, Shenandoah, Great Smoky Mountains and Denali. The Hester Task Force had estimated $1.2 million to start monitoring at two parks; about $1 million in I&M funds was available to split among four, plus $700,000 from regional and park budgets. The parks had competed with technical and cost proposals and were chosen for two reasons: they represented three different bioregions, and they were ready — with fairly complete inventories, ongoing research and monitoring, scientific staff and adequate infrastructure.

• Channel Islands was already monitoring kelp forests, rocky intertidal areas, seabirds and pinnipeds. The money strengthened that work and paid for administration, bat inventories, information management and marine-debris monitoring, with land species to follow; in 1993 the park began protocols for water quality and island foxes.
• Shenandoah had monitored air quality since 1979 and began a comprehensive ecosystem inventory and monitoring programme five years later. By 1992 staff were studying macroinvertebrates, watersheds and forests from permanent plots and transects and making heavy use of GIS. Some work had been prompted by particular threats — the arrival of exotic gypsy moths, development next door — but the programme was designed to give managers a "fundamental understanding of natural resources and processes." In 1993 its projects covered water and air quality, weather, forests, rare plants, black bears, birds, fish, amphibians and aquatic macroinvertebrates.
• Great Smoky Mountains, among the most biodiverse places on Earth, was part of an International Biosphere Reserve under UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere (MAB) programme, and in 1976 became MAB's first pilot site for long-term ecological monitoring in biosphere reserves. It also had its own strong science programme at the Uplands Field Research Laboratory. The first prototype money hired a computer specialist and a biological technician, bought vehicles, computers, data loggers and monitors, and started a data management plan; 1993 projects covered water quality, black bears, white-tailed deer, rare plants, forest exotics, fisheries and aquatic life.
• Denali, the best studied of Alaska's little-studied parks, was the fourth. Earlier proposals had included all 23 Alaska Region parks — whose fragile arctic and subarctic environments were expected to be early warnings of climate change — but the plan was cut back to Denali, the most accessible park with the most existing data. Its 6 million acres were divided into three major watersheds (later five), one to be sampled each year; 1993 projects covered glaciers, climate, soils, water quality, invertebrates, vegetation, birds and small mammals.

A leader

The programme now had a mission, a plan, four study areas, support at the top of the agency and in the parks, draft guidelines and some money — but no leader of its own. Since November 1990 Denny Fenn, Deputy Associate Director for Natural Resources, had coordinated it. In January 1992 the Park Service hired Gary Williams, a staff ecologist coordinating wetland inventory and mapping at the Bureau of Reclamation in Denver.

The job appealed to him except for its location, Washington. He carried the application around for a week before sending it, and hoped to base the job in Colorado, near the GIS, water and air divisions; Fenn said no. After a weekend's thought Williams decided the chance was too good to miss, accepted, and reluctantly moved to an office in the Main Interior Building.

About a month in, two men from the Interior Department's Office of Inspector General knocked on his door. They wanted to know how I&M would fix the problems reported since the 1980 State of the Parks report — among them the General Accounting Office's critical 1987 follow-up and a widely publicised 1989 National Parks Conservation Association report on the agency's neglect of ecosystem management.

Twelve inventories, nine bioregions

Williams gave them the big picture and realised he needed the details quickly. At the spring IMAC meeting he split the members into two groups, sent them to separate rooms, and asked each to work out how its half of the programme would be structured.

The inventory group agreed on 12 basic inventories every park should have — ten of them matching the Evison Report's earlier list:

The monitoring group assigned every park "with significant natural resources" to one of 16 — soon 9 — biogeographic groups. One prototype park would be chosen in each, on the assumption that parks in the same group share "certain ecological conditions," so what one learned about monitoring would apply to the others; as money came, the other parks would adopt the prototype's monitoring.

So I&M would be one programme with two parallel parts. Inventories, run centrally, would fix long-standing problems: too little and unequal knowledge of resources, dependent on a superintendent's interest, in data sets that were patchy, non-standard, unknown or duplicated. Monitoring would then track the health of those ecosystems in perpetuity, giving a scientific basis for management and a view of broad ecological change across the park system. The programme planned to help 50 parks become ready to monitor — with conceptual models of their ecosystems, supporting infrastructure, and knowledge passed on from prototypes to "sister" parks. New prototypes, parks or clusters would compete on scientific merit, readiness and evidence of threats, and would eventually be funded through the parks' own base budgets.

In December 1992 IMAC recommended six new prototypes for 1993, at least two of them "clusters" of parks. After a tenth bioregion was added, seven were chosen — but only three were funded by the end of the decade.

The six-park Great Plains Prairie Cluster (1994) would later become the working model for the 32 I&M networks.

NPS-75

In July 1992, after much revision by Williams, the Park Service issued NPS-75, the Natural Resources Inventory and Monitoring Guideline. Associate Director Hester called it, with the Management Policies and NPS-77, one of "the fundamental references" for natural resource management.

NPS-75 set out the legal basis for I&M — the Management Policies, the Yellowstone and Organic Acts, executive orders, NEPA, the Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts — and five long-term goals:

1. make inventory and monitoring standard practice across the park system, beyond traditional programme and funding boundaries;
2. inventory the natural resources and ecosystems in the Park Service's care;
3. monitor park ecosystems to understand their dynamics and condition and provide reference points for comparison with altered environments;
4. build I&M information into planning, management and decisions;
5. share results with other natural resource organisations and form partnerships.

It gave roles to everyone from the director to park maintenance staff, set a ten-year timeline, and borrowed from Channel Islands a diagram for building ecosystem models. With no "off-the-shelf" way to assess such varied parks, it offered examples, and repeated the Evison Report's principle that long-term monitoring must be base-funded and "institutionalized fully at the level of park operations" to last — forever, in the Park Service's terms.

Two sections, on biological and on chemical and geophysical monitoring, survived from the earliest drafts — written right after the Evison Report and revised in 1988 — which had leaned on MAB's framework of three levels of effort, echoed in NPS-75's three phases of inventory, monitoring and integration. How little of MAB remained showed how far the Park Service had since defined its own goals. Williams had turned drafts that read as a park-level "here's how" into a servicewide "here's why" — and above all made I&M a decision-support programme: national in mission, place-based in practice, delivering results "in a format consistent with managerial decisionmaking needs." It would not try to answer every resource question, but to build a servicewide base of knowledge for solving problems, explaining change and focusing research — avoiding the old failings of science programmes that were too parochial under superintendents or too remote under a central office.

Almost 60 years after Fauna No. 1, the Park Service finally had a formal servicewide programme of its own staff charged with scientific "investigation, to be followed by appropriate administrative action." Then it almost didn't.

Previous chapter: A Herculean Undertaking · Next chapter: chapter 9

Sources

• National Park Service, Inventory & Monitoring Division, I&M Administrative History: Getting to Work, by Alice Wondrak Biel — drawing on I&M annual administrative reports, park reports and an interview with Gary Williams (2019).