1:30 - 2:50 pm
Introduction to the Greater Yellowstone Inventory and Monitoring Network
Cathie Jean
Greater Yellowstone Network

Transcript

Cathie Jean:  You know, I was really surprised when Tom gave me two hours on the agenda

(laughter)

Cathie Jean:  but I thought I had…

Male Voice:  between 5 and 7 tonight

Cathie Jean:  Yeah, but I thought I had kept the presentation to something very reasonable.  And what I’m going to do, is I’m going to start out with a couple of acknowledgements right away.  Tom mentioned that we are located in Bozeman and it’s really through some creative partnerships that that’s been able to happen.  There is not a National Park Service office in Bozeman but currently, we are co-located with the Rocky Mountain Science Center at Montana State University at Bozeman and we also work very closely with Big Sky Institute.  They are also at Montana State University and it’s through Big Sky Institute that we’re able to hire university student help and professional employees through the University that help us get our work done.  I just wanted to acknowledge those individuals right away. 

I’m going to cover four topics in this presentation and the first is really an introductory overview of the program.  I’m pleased to see a lot of new faces in this audience so this presentation is really targeted to those folks that don’t know that much about the inventorying and monitoring program.  You’ll see some of the other topics are really geared toward our specifics.

I also saw that next on the agenda are a couple of the people that we’ve worked with through the partnerships, Chuck Peterson and Dan Rheinhart (?), so they’ll give some really good examples of some projects that we’re working on and that’ll really help complement what I have to give you guys.

Another topic that I’m going to cover is the vital science monitoring plan.  You’ll need to know about that.  I’m going to take a few minutes and just speak to the transforming of our planning process into a monitoring process.  Then I’m going to take a few minutes to close out by giving you my thoughts on integrating the network and park monitoring programs. 

Let’s go into some introductory material.  The Greater Yellowstone Network is one of thirty two networks service wide.  These are clusters of Parks that have been brought together for the purpose of inventory and monitoring.  In our network we work with not only Yellowstone, but also Grand Teton and Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area. In our network, we’re dealing with a small group of Parks, a big Park.  Some of these Parks have up to 17 Parks they’re working with.  Something that important to know is that the Greater Yellowstone network, that’s our four letter acronym there, is one of the 12 networks leading the Vital Signs Monitoring Planning process  By this I mean that we’re one of the first groups to get started. 

It’s for this reason you could be working with Glacier National Park, they’re in the Rocky Mountain Network and they’re just in a planning stage that’s couple of years different than us.  Over time we’ll see these sequencing, it won’t make any difference because we’ll all be far enough along but it’s kind of important to know that there’s some different scheduling there.

The inventory part of our program has two important goals.  The first is to document through existing, verifiable data and targeted field investigations, the occurrence of at least 90 percent of the species of vertebrates and vascular plants currently in the park.   After hearing John’s talk, that seems kind of silly and in a park like Yellowstone, the kinds of data gaps and things we’ve found were not that significant, but I can tell you, in some of the other National Parks across the nation, these inventories were the first.  I mean it was the first time they ever put together an animal list in the parks and so these programs can really bring in a lot of value. 

Another goal of the Inventory Program was to describe the distribution and relative abundance of species of special concern, such as threatened and endangered species, exotics and other species of special management.  In our network, we put a lot of emphasis into inventories on exotic plants across all three network parks as well as well as there were Bald Eagle nest inventories that were done at Grand Teton and sage grass at Grand Teton and that sort of thing. 

These biological inventories, as well as the monitoring program, are funded through the Natural Resource Challenge.  These are permanent increases in base funds that are really intended to bring science to the parks. 

Our inventory started in 2001.  Preceding that, there was a study plan done for the inventories and that was completed in the year 2000.  Essentially, what this graph is showing you, is that in 2001, the money started to flow into this Inventorying and Monitoring program here at Greater Yellowstone.  So it’s relatively new, 5 years old.  The red line shows our inventory dollars and we basically received funding for inventories for a four year period.  So our inventories, and I really make this point to distinguish that there’s lots of inventories at Yellowstone that have taken place and will continue to take place, but those funded by the I and N program started in 2001.

The field work will be complete this year and we’ll see other completion reports brought to us in 2006.  So concurrently with the inventory dollars we also receive monitoring funds.  Unlike the inventory funds, the monitoring funds are planned to continue through out the life of the program which is forever.  That’s a big word, but the whole idea is that the monitoring is a long term program and like everybody else, the funds have to be appropriated by congress and etc.  Also we receive funding from water resource division for monitoring water quality, those funds came in at a certain level and they just stay that way throughout the life of the program.  That gives you a little bit of a picture of what we’re about budget wise. 

Underlying both Inventory and Monitoring is a very strong data management component.  The national program expects that we’re spending about 30 percent of our funds on data management and that includes some of the planning part, stewardship part, data analysis and reporting. 

We also have some responsibilities with respect to some service wide data management tools.  Very briefly there’s a Service wide data base called NP species. That’s an access data base that holds the plant and animal lists for the National Parks and I know that in Yellowstone, we’ve gone beyond just the vascular plants and vertebrates that the original inventories focused on.  Therere a lot of invertebrate materials that are going into the data base.  This year we’re working on a fairly large project to certify the records in this database so that they would be releasable to the public.  I won’t go into much more depth about that.

There’s also a data base called Dataset catalogue that stores information about data sets that have been collected in the park over time.  We put a big effort into this catalogue; there are a lot of records.  These included previous inventory, monitoring and research projects.  It may include information like what were the years the information was collected, who collected it, where does it sit now?  Is it in a computer, is it in a cell file, is it in somebody’s filing cabinet or is the data lost or not available right now?

NatureBib’s a geographic data base and of course we work closely with the Network Parks and GIS so that we’re not duplicating efforts and we’re basically building information and data together with the parks. 

Just a few of the inventories that took place for vascular plants, you know, I mentioned that we had exotic plant work done.  In Yellowstone, it was essentially in the northern range and in Grand Teton it was in different areas throughout the park.

 I don’t have much time to go into much detail on these projects, I kind of regret it, but a neat project that Jennifer Whipple worked on is an inventory of alpine plants in Yellowstone.  Mary got out in some of those high elevation places.

 These were areas that had no previous vascular plant inventory work because they are so hard to get to or they had been closed for bear restrictions.  Indeed, they got up there and began to look, as evidenced by this picture, and if you’ll look, you’ll see they found a couple of new species.  They’re not new to science but they’re new to the park. So some of that hard effort really paid off.  Is Cheryl still here?  I guess ,Cheryl, you went up with them and helped scope them into some limestone areas where there was a higher likelihood of finding some of these unusual plants. 

Vertebrate inventories, a big one includes the inventory for Snake River Cutthroat trout.  This year, Todd Cool (?) and Dan Mahoney and their crews will be in the second year of that inventory here in Yellowstone.  The really nice thing about this inventory in Yellowstone is that there was concurrently an inventory in Grand Teton and also the Bridger Teton National Forest.  So in the upper Snake River watershed they’re has been a complete, and by complete I mean there are areas they didn’t get too, but a very comprehensive inventory of trout.  Very shortly, maybe as early as next month, we’ll have some preliminary reports back on those.

We had amphibian inventories done across all three the network parks. Chuck’s here, I don’t know if he’ll talk much about the inventories but certainly the monitoring these inventories led into.

I’m going to move right into the Vital Signs Monitoring Plan.  No orientation to our program can be complete without talking about what we’re doing and the plan we put together that describes what we’re up to. 

Let me first define a Vital Sign.  It’s essentially an indicator designed to monitor ecosystem health.  The term was picked up by the park service and you know when we hear vital signs in a health community as well.  Anyway, it’s been adopted by the park service and that’s what we call our monitoring programs.  Essentially it’s about natural resource monitoring.

We completed the first complete draft of our Vital Signs Monitoring Plan last December and submitted it to the Washington office for peer review.  This plan would be the equivalent of a business plan.  It essentially establishes who we are, what our plans are for monitoring natural resources.  It includes such things as our operational plans and staffing plans.  It went through several peer reviews, certainly the National program has to peer review it and the regional office.  I think just last week we received our last peer review comments.  This plan will be revised based on this peer review and will be finalized on or before September this year.

The Vital Signs Monitoring Program has goals that are applicable to all the networks.  I’m not going to read all these goals word by word, but what I want to do is point out the text that been highlighted in blue.

The goals of the Monitoring Program are to determine the status and trends and selected indicators, to allow managers to make better and more informed decisions, to provide early warning of abnormal conditions in order to develop effective mitigation measures. 

Another goal is to better understand the dynamic nature and condition of park ecosystems and also to meet certain legal and congressional mandates.  And last, to provide a measure of progress toward performance goals. 

So we basically adopted these goals. Then within our program, in order to assure applicability, reliability and feasibility, we went through a multi step process to decide, first of all, what it would be that we’re monitoring.  What indicators are important here in the Greater Yellowstone network, and again, that includes these three parks.  You’ll see some desert features kind of enter in because of our work with Bighorn Canyon. 

We went through a pretty comprehensive process.  Many of you folks were involved.  It included literature survey, development of conceptual models, Delphi surveys, etc., park workshops, workshops to rank and evaluate vital signs, and close work with the technical committee.   Tom Olaf has been a member of our technical committee and in terms of how we’re governed, we work with a board of directors that’s includes the park Superintendents, our assistant Superintendents and then our big day operations we’re governed by a technical committee. 

This resulted in a list of Vital Signs.  We used conceptual models a lot in our program and this model isn’t exactly one of the models that went in.  In a model such as this, we identify important drivers or cross the (?), important ecosystem stressors that are related to these drivers and response variables that are important or that we care about.

 In our network this is an example how, from a model, certain of these drivers or stressors or response variables became vital signs that we wanted to monitor in our program.

I don’t have time to go into the Delphi Survey much except to tell you guys, that scoped a really large group of people through the internet.  There were three different rounds of questionnaires.  In short, or long, we came up with a list of forty five or so vital signs.  That’s a lot and it’s important to know that these are all really important.  Many of these are being monitored by the park now or other agencies.  From this list, the Network, with the help of the technical committee, selected twelve vital signs that we would work on in more detail.  And here they are. 

I’m not going to read them, you guys see them jump out.  Some of them have long term monitoring programs.  We’ll be able to augment our work.  Some of those have strong partnerships like the USGS Army program that we can work with.  We’ll go into that a little in the rest of the presentation.

Transforming from planning into implementation takes a lot of planning.  This is a slide I got for Rob Bennetts. (?)   Important for this group to know is before money can actually go on the ground for monitoring, our monitoring protocols have to follow the Oakley et. al. guidelines for long term monitoring protocols.  They’re a lot of common sense, good guidelines.  They’d be peer reviewed by the regional office and right now we’re working on a group of twelve vital signs that really translate into twelve protocols. 

How are we going to do it?  From an operational standpoint it’s really nice to have this group. We know what we’re working on.  We have a schedule so we’re not working on them all at once.  We have some activity going on….all these vital signs. 

At the end of the presentation, I’m going to give you some web address where you can go and get more information.  I know this presentation will also be available and you can always call us up and get it. 

To do these monitoring protocols, we go through a planning process that involves the steps of information synthesis, formulating specific objectives, sampling design.  We have many sampling designs we’re working on.   Other cases the sampling design isn’t as necessary.  Everything’s documented in a monitoring plan of protocol.  This is all so that we can get out and start doing the work.  We have pilot projects going where we’re implementing.

Where are we today?  We’re at a very exciting place today because we’re moving into implementation.  This year we begin implementing with a finished protocol for our water quality, specifically in the 303D streams.  These are streams that have impaired water quality across the network.  It’s especially important in Big Horn Canyon where they have water quality problems. 

Last, and in closure, a few thoughts on why it’s important to integrate between a network and park.  You know, we’re National Park Service, we’re not that far away.  There’re still a lot of strategic considerations on working closely with the parks any time we can.  Many of the twelve vital signs that were chosen for the network fill gaps in current monitoring.  An effective monitoring strategy will employ a suite of measurements that can collectively monitor the integrity of the ecosystem. 

Because of the things the network can bring into a monitoring program, in combination with the things that are already taking in place in Yellowstone is really where the strength of this monitoring program can lay.  They can’t be separate.  They need to be integrated but in order to integrate…. Let’s take a close look at how you do that.

This is where the devil sneaks out.  You find out it can be harder, it can take awhile.  What I’ve done, is that I’ve got three areas that I want to leave a take home message with this group, especially some of the YCR employees that are conducting monitoring.

  I feel we can maximize the utility of information to park managers.  The network can help provide technical assistance.  By technical resources I’m really talking about the brainpower; the human resources.   We have a group of three professionals, we have a huge workload, but over time, as we move through this planning and go into implementation, I would like to work with the parks to update, revise or prepare new monitoring protocols to improve the applicability and reliability of monitoring data. 

We’d like to work with the parks to provide data and information management tools and resources so that data and information can be more readily available and usable. 

Last, we’d like to collaborate with the parks on data analysis, synthesis and reporting.  Those are my concluding comments.  I’m going to end and maybe…I don’t know if we have time for questions but these two websites…  The upper website is where you can go to the Greater Yellowstone Network website and find things like that monitoring plan, inventory reports that are completed and posted.  You have to check every once in awhile because we continue to post things. 

The second website address basically goes to the National I&M Program monitoring webpage because there is a lot of really useful tools for monitoring and a lot of more in depth information about what the national program is doing in terms of the Vital Signs Monitoring Program.  That’s all.

(applause)