I&M Administrative History: The Evison Report

Early in 1987, the US General Accounting Office (GAO) released a report evaluating how well the NPS had followed through on the remediation plan it had formulated in response to the 1980 State of the Parks report. The news wasn’t good. Despite a 111% increase in resource management funding from 1980 to 1984, the bureau had not completed any of the tasks or initiatives promised in the 1981 remediation plan. Park staff had proposed many projects to address the threats identified in State of the Parks, but most had not been funded. More than half of the initiatives had been started and then abandoned. If the NPS had successfully mitigated any of the threats identified in State of the Parks, no one had kept track of it. Most parks had completed resource management plans, but few had updated them annually. None had been used to guide the budgeting process, as the 1980 report had recommended. And each time Congress had considered a bill to strengthen the Secretary of the Interior’s authority to protect park resources from external threats, the Department of the Interior had opposed it, arguing the legislation was superfluous because the Secretary already possessed the necessary authority. None of the bills became law.¹

Three of the 11 incomplete initiatives had been intended to provide park managers with access to basic resource information. The first would have directly improved parks’ resource information bases. Asked why progress on this initiative was stopped in 1983, Associate Director for Natural Resources William Horn explained that the development of park resource-information bases “merely repeated what was already required in Park Service planning policy.”² (Horn acknowledged that no park in the system had actually developed the information base it needed to properly manage its resources, but assured the GAO that the bureau was working on it.) The NPS had also stopped trying to develop guidance for resource monitoring programs in 1983, after finding that many park units lacked the scientific expertise necessary to complete the effort. A servicewide database of resource problems and solutions had been started, dropped in 1983, and then restarted two years later. In an assessment that likely surprised no one, the GAO concluded, “[T]he lack of basic information about park resources described in the 1980 State of the Parks report still exists. As a result, the Park Service does not have complete knowledge of what resources it has or what condition those resources are in.”³ Amid the public-relations fallout from Playing God in Yellowstone, the GAO’s insistence that this information was necessary for proper planning and management, and to establish basic accountability for the resources the NPS was entrusted to protect, was especially potent.

The GAO also reiterated the need for the NPS to “develop and implement long-term programs to monitor resource condition changes over time.” Interestingly, this recommendation was made at the specific request of Associate Director Horn. In his comments on the draft report, Horn had observed, “the report neglects to emphasize . . . [that] the Service must not only make a one-time effort to collect baseline information, but must also establish long-term programs to monitor appropriate parameters for changes over time.”⁴ In fact, at long last, this project had recently begun, via a circuitous route of policy and personality.

In October 1986, a group of NPS scientists, high-level managers, and university researchers had met in Seattle to discuss what would come to be called the NPS Natural Resources Inventory and Monitoring Initiative.⁵ They were led by Alaska Regional Director Boyd Evison, who had a long history of supporting science in national park management. After overseeing the formation of the Uplands Field Research Laboratory while superintendent at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Evison had turned down the NPS directorship, then become superintendent at Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Parks, home to a cutting-edge science program. There, he turned the superintendent’s residence into the Southern Sierra Research Center, which provided living quarters for visiting researchers, office space for science staff, and a first-class wet laboratory in the garage.⁶ Evison had arrived in Alaska in 1985, shortly after the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act placed more than 100 million acres of federal lands into new or expanded national parks and preserves, national wildlife refuges, designated wilderness areas, wild and scenic rivers, and other “conservation system units.”⁷ As regional director, he was now responsible for making decisions about a whole lot of land the government knew very little about and, as in the past, he saw science as the best way to change that. Evison has been called “one of the first senior managers in the NPS to understand the need for science in parks,” and by 1986, he had been urging his fellow NPS managers to embrace “baseline data collection, long-term monitoring, and effective resource management” for more than a dozen years.⁸ He was convinced that under the leadership of NPS Director William Mott, it might actually happen.

Educated at Berkeley, William Penn Mott, Jr., dedicated his entire professional career to public parks. He was hired as a landscape architect for the National Park Service in 1933, then went on to lead the Oakland city parks and East Bay Regional Park District before being appointed head of the California state parks by Governor Ronald Reagan in 1967.⁹ When President Reagan made him NPS director in 1985, Mott took his place in an Interior Department whose priorities were frequently misaligned with his own. Unlike many of his fellow DOI leaders, Mott favored expansion of the National Park System, reintroduction of the wolf to Yellowstone, and had a reputation as a conservationist who served as a bulwark between many of his subordinates’ decisions and the DOI officials who would like to have overturned them.¹⁰ Mott’s key policy initiative, a “12-Point Plan,” was designed to “strengthen public trust” in the NPS, “revitalize the organization,” and “assure its continued success over time.” It was built around his belief that the bureau’s highest mission was to deliver the national parks to future generations unimpaired.

Mott knew that couldn’t happen until the bureau closed the gap between what it knew and what it didn’t know about the resources in its care.¹¹ He wanted the NPS to be “standard bearers of systematic, practical scientific knowledge as a basis for sound judgment decisions,” and one of the plan’s action items was for the NPS to “Create Usable Resource Inventories for Each Park.”¹² The plan also called for a “blue-ribbon panel” of outside scientists to re-examine the findings of the Leopold Report. As a starting point, the panel was expected to “identify the common elements . . . found in all national park system units” and “begin to develop a holistic approach to park management that recognizes and values parks as remnant ecosystems, gene pools, cultural benchmarks, and places for recreational and spiritual renewal.” In September 1986, an NPS “Task Force on Conserving Gene Pools” convened in Washington, DC, led by Christine Schonewald-Cox, NPS Research Scientist with the NPS/CPSU at University of California–Davis. After the meeting, several members of the gene-pool task force met with NPS Associate Director Richard Briceland and generated a five-year action program focused on biological diversity.¹³ As Schonewald-Cox described it some months later, one of that plan’s objectives was

developing state-of-the-art standards for inventorying and monitoring that would integrate classic I&M techniques with assessment of health and ‘viability’ for populations of . . . species and communities . . . [T]he plan is to test the I&M standards and guidelines at a particular park site and adjust them so that they can be applied to other parks. They must be responsive to different budget commitments, park sizes, and mission orientations, thereby maintaining flexibility for a decentralized System.¹⁴

She was describing the work of Boyd Evison’s group, which had generated the NPS Natural Resources Inventory and Monitoring Initiative. Released in May 1987, the “Evison Report” described a program of servicewide inventories and long-term monitoring of natural resources that would be required for implementation of the “Biological Diversity MBO” devised by the gene-pool subgroup. The I&M program would “be the critical source of data for setting parameters of any biological diversity programs, and for evaluating their ultimate success.”¹⁵ Along with Associate Director Briceland, Schonewald-Cox was listed as a contributor to the Evison Report, in the company of a diverse, interdisciplinary collection of academic experts and NPS scientists and policymakers, including Gary Davis and Raymond Herrmann (see Appendix A).

Both halves of I&M were now directly tied to a director’s initiative, making them likely to get the support they needed to be realized. In the words of Evison, “we are finally beginning to hear those things put into the ‘official word.’ There is no question that Bill Mott’s leadership has forced a turn of the corner in this.”¹⁶

By 1987, people inside and outside the National Park Service had been advocating for inventory and monitoring for decades, and the NPS had identified it as a priority in management documents at least since 1975. But the Evison Report, and the seed money that followed it, was the first indication the bureau intended to act. Despite its brevity, the report established a set of overarching ideas and principles that remain the foundation of the I&M program today. At its heart were the twin convictions, espoused back in Fauna No. 1, that to protect park resources, managers needed scientific information to inform their decisions—and the most appropriate people to provide that information came from within the NPS, itself.

Just 11 pages long, the Evison Report outlined the broad strokes of a program that would “assemble baseline inventory data describing the natural resources under [National Park Service] stewardship, and monitor those resources forever.” The authors drew a straight line between inventory and monitoring activities and the Organic Act, explaining that without I&M, the NPS could never fulfill its mandated duties:

The National Park Service is responsible for the management of natural resources in a manner that conserves them unimpaired for future generations. It is essential, therefore, that park managers know the nature and condition of the resources under their care, have the means to detect and document changes in those resources, and understand the forces driving those changes. . . . Simply put: To determine appropriate management actions, we must know what resources we hold in trust, how they change over time, and how those changes are related to human activities.

The new program, the authors asserted, was of superlative importance not just to the National Park Service, but to the nation as a whole: “In a very real sense, Inventory and Monitoring may be the most important legacy the Park Service can provide American conservation.”¹⁷

That was page one. Moving on, the report summarized the Service’s spotty record of collecting enough scientific data to comply with its own existing policies (and key environmental legislation), and argued that the continued “lack of fundamental resource data and any measure of change” was the unifying principle underlying the GAO’s recent, scathing criticism of the bureau.¹⁸

The authors identified three key ingredients required for the program’s success: prioritization, consistent funding, and integration of its findings into park decisionmaking.

Such a system should include a Servicewide recognition of inventory and monitoring activities as fundamental, high-priority management responsibilities at each level of the agency. Successful execution of that responsibility depends upon its being fully accepted and integrated into management decisions at all levels of the National Park Service. Long-term monitoring needs must, at the earliest possible time, be base-funded and closely tracked at all organizational levels to assure the continuity upon which they depend.¹⁹

Like the three legs of a stool, each of these three interdependent elements was necessary for the program to work. Past experience had shown that if the NPS Director failed to prioritize science—as had happened after the death of George Wright, during Mission 66, and following the 1963 Robbins Report—then initiatives would lose momentum, be underfunded, and would fail. If the program was not funded well enough to successfully achieve its objectives, then it would be unable to contribute to decisionmaking, thereby losing its value and importance—and would fail. And if the findings of a program created to provide information for decisionmaking were not used in decisionmaking, then the program would not be valuable enough to be prioritized and funded—and would fail.

The Evison Report envisioned I&M being implemented at the park scale. That way, parks would have investment and ownership in the program, avoiding the perception it was another science initiative being imposed from above, without regard to the management needs of the parks it purported to help. Long-term success was impossible, the authors theorized, unless the program was “fully institutionalized at the level of park operations,” which would ensure its prioritization and integration into park decisionmaking.²⁰ Only once the program was fully institutionalized could its success be assured. Within the park structure, I&M was to occupy a liminal space “between research and resource management,” dependent on cooperation from those entities and on “the formal support of administration at every level.” Recognizing it would be impossible to earn park-level support if I&M cannibalized funding and personnel from existing park programs, the authors wrote, “It is unlikely this program can succeed without commitment of new funding—not redirection from other essential resource programs—and additional staff.”²¹

To implement the effort, the report called for regional directors to compile a list of parks that were already doing I&M or had “critical needs” for it. From that list, the NPS director would choose 12 parks. In an appendix, the Evison Report identified 17 “proposed candidate” pilot parks and areas. Most had existing I&M programs or notably strong science programs. Also included were the Alaska parks identified in Mott’s 12-Point Plan as “new, uninventoried, and undeveloped,” with “critical” research needs.

• Great Smoky Mountains
• Glacier
• Channel Islands
• Sequoia and Kings Canyon
• Yellowstone
• Olympic
• Acadia
• Everglades
• Glacier Bay
• North Cascades
• Shenandoah
• Big Bend
• Haleakala
• Isle Royale
• Alaska Arctic Areas
• Alaska Subarctic Areas
• Atlantic Barrier Islands

A secondary goal, in choosing pilot parks, was “to achieve as broad an ecosystem representation as possible (desert, temperate hardwood, temperate conifer, subtropical moist, island, alpine, arctic, etc.).” Though it wasn’t explained at the time, this criterion would be important as the program evolved.

As for what I&M would look like in practice, the Evison Report was specific on some aspects and intentionally vague on others—a characteristic that would come to define the I&M program over time. Acknowledging the difficulty of creating a single ecological monitoring program for hundreds of parks with vast ecological differences and reasons for existing, the authors recognized that “No universally appropriate ‘off the shelf’ procedures are available for direct implementation, nor is it likely that one set of procedures will be appropraite (sic), in kind, in depth, or in technical approach, to all park units.” Program design was to be site-specific, and include “biotic and abiotic resources and the process[es] by which they interact.”²²

Though the report didn’t use the terminology of “vital signs,” its description of the kinds of elements and processes recommended for inventory and monitoring closely approximated those used by the Channel Islands I&M program:

I&M should include a combination of some measures of diversity, such as presence/absence of species, distribution, and population dynamics information on selected species. Criteria for selection of species for population dynamics monitoring include, for example: 1) a representative array of ecological roles and trophic levels; 2) legal status (e.g., endangered); 3) park endemics; 4) park aliens; 5) species legally or illegally taken from park populations; 6) species which characterize entire communities; 7) species subject to insularity; 8) heroic species; 9) elements described in enabling legislation.²³

Selecting appropriate ecological indicators was a matter of no small consequence. In capital letters, the authors warned, “ELEMENTS AND PROCESSES SELECTED FOR INVENTORY OR MONITORING MUST BE UNAMBIGUOUSLY DEFINABLE, IDENTIFIABLE, AND MEASURABLE.”²⁴ The reason for this was simple: scientific credibility. A defining feature of the I&M program, as it began and as it progressed, was reliance on strict protocols intentionally designed to be precisely repeatable by multiple observers over many years. To achieve that level of objectivity in data collection, the things being evaluated could not be moving targets. For their scientific analysis and interpretation to be valid, the indicators themselves had to be purely objective. For example:

“state of health” or “vegetation type” are not directly measurable subjects because they are high level, subjective units not directly measurable in a repeatable fashion (i.e., different workers will produce different measures of the same subject). However, these high-order subjects may be inferred by skilled ecologists from objective measures.²⁵

If the program’s findings were to serve as the basis for park decisionmaking, then the conclusions drawn by its ecologists had to be scientifically reliable. Otherwise there was no point.

In addition to these broad descriptions, the authors provided a list of “candidate elements and processes for initial inventory:”

• Presence of multicellular animal and plant taxa
• Distribution and status of vertebrate animal and key vascular plant species/populations
• Surficial geology
• Distribution of soil taxa
• Human occupation/disturbance history (retrospective)
• Fire and other natural events history (retrospective)
• Precipitation chemistry
• Atmospheric chemistry
• Weather (retrospective, from established stations)
• Hydrological data (principal watersheds)
• Other biotic elements (e.g., rates of decomposition, rates of growth, length of needle retention, other ecosystem processes)²⁶

Although the authors urged the NPS to seek the “advice, counsel, and cooperation of other natural resources agencies, universities, conservation organizations, and scholarly associations” as the program was developed, they specified that “the Park Service must carry a large measure of responsibility for directing this new field of endeavor”—likely because it considered scientific investigations and management actions based on their results to be “interdependent activities.”²⁷ Three main next steps were identified: a systematic assessment of existing I&M activities, establishment of program standards and guidelines, and an outline of recommended program stages. A step-down plan (a tool adopted from the Channel Islands program) laid out the implementation process, starting with the top-level task of defining its standards and guidelines, and then assessing the current status of I&M activities relative to those standards. From there, the bureau would develop protocols for pilot park programs, provide long-term funding and trained personnel, and, finally, expand the program servicewide.

None of it would happen quickly. Nor would it happen in exactly the way the Evison Report’s authors had originally envisioned. But it would happen, and through its maturation, the program would remain remarkably true to its original intent.

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Research and writing by Alice Wondrak Biel, Writer-Editor, National Park Service Inventory & Monitoring Division

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¹U.S. General Accounting Office, “Parks and Recreation: Limited Progress Made in Documenting and Mitigating Threats to the Parks,” 11, 25, 55.

²U.S. General Accounting Office, “Parks and Recreation: Limited Progress Made in Documenting and Mitigating Threats to the Parks,” 26.

³U.S. General Accounting Office, “Parks and Recreation: Limited Progress,” 36.

⁴U.S. General Accounting Office, “Parks and Recreation: Limited Progress,” 38.

⁵Davis, “Channel Islands National Park Vital Signs Monitoring Milestones, 1980–2003.”

⁶David J. Parsons, “The Early Years of Sequoia and Kings Canyon Science: Building a Research Program,” Parks Stewardship Forum 36, no. 2 (2020), 312.

⁷“Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) Program,” Alaska Department of Fish and Game, accessed May 12, 2020, https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=habitatoversight.anilca.

⁸Boyd Evison,” American Academy for Park and Recreation Administration, accessed May 12, 2020, https://aapra.org/pugsley-bios/boyd-evison; “Scientists Hear Mott Call for ‘Long View,’” Park Science: A Resource Management Bulletin 7, no. 1 (Fall 1986), 7.

⁹California Department of Parks and Recreation, “William Penn Mott,” 2014, http://150.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=27580.

¹⁰Dolan, “Reagan Record on Parks Gets Mixed Marks.”

¹¹Janet A. McDonnell, “The National Park Service Looks Toward the 21st Century: The 1988 General Superintendents Conference and Discovery 2000,” January 2001, https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/hisnps/NPSThinking/suptreport.htm.

¹²National Park Service, “12-Point Plan: The Challenge: The Actions” (US Department of the Interior, 1986), 2.

¹³Gene Pools Task Force Proposes Five-Year Plan,” Park Science: A Resource Management Bulletin 7, no. 2 (1987): 9.

¹⁴Five-Year Plan for Biodiversity Action on Track,” Park Science: A Resource Management Bulletin 7, no. 3 (1987): 10.

¹⁵“MBO” referred to Management by Objectives, a stepwise management process introduced in 1954 and popular in government use during the 1980s. David Graber et al., “National Park Service Natural Resources Inventory and Monitoring Initiative” (National Park Service, May 1987), 3, http://npshistory.com/publications/interdisciplinary/im/im-initiative-1987.pdf.

¹⁶“Scientists Hear Mott Call for ‘Long View.’”

¹⁷Graber et al., “Evison Report,” 1.

¹⁸Graber et al., “Evison Report,” 3.

¹⁹Graber et al., “Evison Report,” 3.

²⁰Graber et al., “Evison Report,” 3; Davis, Halvorson, and Ehorn, “Science and Management in U.S. National Parks.”

²¹Graber et al., “Evison Report,” 3.

²²Graber et al., “Evison Report,” 5.

²³Graber et al., “Evison Report,” 5.

²⁴Graber et al., “Evison Report,” 6.

²⁵Graber et al., “Evison Report,” 11.

²⁶Graber et al., “Evison Report,” 5–6.

²⁷Graber et al., “Evison Report,” 1.

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