A California newt (Taricha torosa) in Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. Image from the NPS's page.
Knowing what lives in the parks
A basic duty of the National Park Service is to understand and protect the variety of life in the parks. Managers and scientists need to know which species occur where — and visitors want to know what plants and animals they might see.
Species occurrence and distribution were among the first inventories done by the Park Service's Inventory & Monitoring staff. Between 2000 and 2010, scientists surveyed vertebrates and vascular plants in more than 280 parks, focusing on the highest-priority species. They produced reports and data sets, carefully recording survey methods, locations, habitat and observation details.
NPSpecies
The findings went into NPSpecies, an application for managing park species lists. With it you can:
- download a park's species list or print a checklist;
- see which parks a species is found in;
- check a species' status — threatened or endangered, or invasive.
Each record is backed by evidence: observation records, documents or museum specimens.
A golden-crowned kinglet (Regulus satrapa) in Glacier National Park. NPS photo by Jacob W. Frank.
NPSpecies is a work in progress. New parks have joined the system since the inventories, many lists need updating, and interest is growing in invertebrates, fungi, non-vascular plants and other groups. Planning in 2018 and 2019 set out where to focus next.
What the terms mean
Occurrence
- Present — occurs in the park, with current, reliable evidence.
- Probably present — high confidence, but current, verified evidence is needed.
- Unconfirmed — attributed to the park, but evidence is weak or absent.
- Not in park — not known to occur there.
- Tags add detail: adjacent (found next to the park), false report (an earlier report was a misidentification or similar error) and historical (documented in the past).
Abundance
| Rating | Animals | Plants |
|---|---|---|
| Abundant | may be seen daily, in large numbers | many individuals, over much of the park |
| Common | may be seen daily, not in large numbers | many individuals in commonly found habitats |
| Uncommon | likely seen monthly; may be locally common | few to moderate numbers, scattered or in uncommon habitats |
| Rare | seen only a few times a year | few individuals, in small areas of rare habitat |
| Occasional | at least every few years, not every year | varies from year to year (for example, desert plants) |
Nativeness: native (naturally occurs in the park or region), non-native (there because of deliberate or accidental human activity) or unknown.
Checklist or full list? The checklist includes only species that are present or probably present. The full list adds those that are unconfirmed, historical, wrongly reported, or still in review, with more detail on each — so the checklist is almost always shorter.
Try it: the source page's search tool offers lists for Arches National Park by category — amphibians, birds, fish, mammals, reptiles and vascular plants. For any park, visit NPSpecies, and send corrections through its suggestion form.
Sources
Based on "Species Inventories," Inventory & Monitoring, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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