I&M Administrative History: A Herculean Undertaking

Just two months before the Evison Report was released, the National Park Service underwent a major leadership shake-up. In March 1987, Associate Director for Natural Resources Richard Briceland was replaced by F. Eugene “Gene” Hester who, in an unusual move for the time, came from outside the NPS.¹ Hester was an 18-year veteran of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, most recently serving as that agency’s deputy director.² A change in leadership often brings a change in priorities, but Hester was not only committed to the I&M program, he was committed to ensuring it was implemented efficiently and effectively. Hester was determined to bring a strategic, programmatic approach to NPS resource management, and as associate director he supported the professionalization of the field, systematic implementation of the I&M program, and a systemwide gap analysis of resource-management needs relative to available personnel.³ Hester’s approach represented a significant contrast to how things had been done in the past, when personalities often influenced priorities more strongly than policy did.

In fall 1987, Hester announced that as prescribed in the Evison Report, efforts were underway to draft a set of I&M standards and guidelines, and to assess the status of existing I&M activities servicewide.⁴ A developmental draft of the guidelines, to be known as NPS-75, was released for preliminary review in December. The following spring, a second draft was released, and managers from 183 NPS units completed an “inventorying and monitoring questionnaire.” The questionnaire was designed, first, to determine whether NPS units had resource inventories and other information representing four categories of study: biological, geophysical, and chemical elements, and human use. Second, it asked if park staff routinely updated extant inventories, were monitoring the resources of interest, and had access to ecological models. It also asked whether the records parks had were computer-based.

The raw results were released in early 1989. Curiously, they were not accompanied by any sort of analysis or summation, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions. Those who took the time to do so found a predictable paucity of data. Of 179 possible inventory topics, there were only 18 for which more than half the parks said they had information (see table).⁵ Fewer than half the parks said they had records for the other 161 topics.

Table 1. Natural-resource information more than half of surveyed parks (n=183) reported having in 1988.

Category	Study type	Inventory topic	Parks responding “YES”
Biological	Basic Inventory	Topographic maps	83%
Geophysical	Basic Inventory	Topographic maps	82%
Geophysical	Chemical Containment	Inventory of chemical control of exotic pests	71%
Biological	Species Inventory	Information that identifies endangered species	71%
Biological	Species Inventory	Checklist of birds that are predominant or of special interest	70%
Biological	Species Inventory	Information that identifies threatened species	70%
Biological	Species Inventory	Information that identifies exotic species	70%
Biological	Basic Inventory	Maps that use aerial photography	69%
Biological	Species Inventory	Information that identifies rare species	69%
Geophysical	Basic Inventory	Maps that use aerial photography	68%
Geophysical	Meteorology	Historic records on precipitation	65%
Biological	Species Inventory	Checklist of flowering plants that are predominant or of special interest	64%
Geophysical	Meteorology	Historic records on air temperature	63%
Biological	Species Inventory	Checklist of mammals that are predominant or of special interest	63%
Geophysical	Basic Inventory	Records for unique, unusual, or catastrophic events (e.g., fire, volcanism, meteorologic)	56%
Geophysical	Hydrology	Temperature (minimum/maximum) data	56%
Biological	Basic Inventory	Records for unique, unusual, or catastrophic events (e.g., fire, volcanism, meteorologic)	52%
Biological	Maps	Vegetation type maps	52%

When asked if they routinely updated the inventories they had, or monitored the resources associated with them, the numbers were even lower. The number of parks with ecological models (i.e., for species populations and communities, hydrology, meteorology, fire suppression) ranged from 1% to 13%. The highest percentage of parks with computer-based records for any single inventory topic was 24%: about one-quarter of responding parks had digital air-temperature records. But for the vast majority of topics, less than 10% of existing data were stored on computers.

The I&M survey did not ask if the information parks had was “complete,” or even “adequate”—just whether it existed at all. This frustrated some resource managers, including those at Assateague Island National Seashore. In response, that park’s resource staff investigated the state of their own resource knowledge. The result was a 200-page qualitative assessment and gap analysis of inventory and monitoring projects at Assateague Island. The report catalogued all existing I&M projects, compiled a bibliography of park research, and included recommendations for how park operations could be changed to enhance I&M activities.⁶

A few months after park managers received the I&M questionnaire, the results of a separate state-of-knowledge survey were released. The Natural Resources Assessment and Action Program (NRAAP) was another product of Director Mott’s 12-Point Plan. At a servicewide scale, NRAAP identified the types of natural resources found in each park and attempted to report on their status, major management issues, and existing programs to address them. Choosing from a list of six major categories (plant, animal, geologic, water, air and esthetic resources) and 30 subcategories, park staff were asked to indicate whether each resource category or subcategory was represented in their unit. Respondents were also asked to characterize the condition of those resources. Predictably, many resource managers didn’t have enough information to be able to accurately assess resource condition, let alone support management actions related to those resources. In each major NRAAP category, up to half the parks containing a given resource said their data on it were inadequate.⁷

If the I&M questionnaire and NRAAP report revealed the enormity of the need, the Assateague Island report demonstrated that for many park managers, it couldn’t be met soon enough. In 1989, Associate Director Hester assembled a group of NPS staff and assigned them to figure out how to turn the Evison group’s diaphanous vision into concrete reality. The team was created when Hester realized it would be vastly more effective to have a diverse group spearhead I&M implementation, instead of just a handful of high-level staff from the Washington office.⁸ Its make-up reflected the largely bureaucratic nature of its task. In contrast to the Evison group, the Hester Task Force (HTF) was made up entirely of NPS staff, and included specialists in program management and budget analysis (see Appendix A). Their plan was released in April 1990.

Taking the Evison Report as its philosophical starting point, the HTF report cited the new NPS Management Policies, released in December 1988, as the policy justification for inventory and monitoring. The Management Policies had elucidated now-familiar objectives:

The National Park Service will assemble baseline inventory data describing the natural resources under its stewardship and will monitor those resources at regular intervals to detect or predict changes. The resulting information will be analyzed to detect changes that may require intervention and to provide reference points for comparison with other, more altered environments.⁹

The HTF identified the I&M program’s long-term implementation goal as “the development of monitoring programs in all parks with significant natural resources.”¹⁰ Under this vision, the program would make it possible for any park—regardless of size, location, or budget—to have the strong science it needed to support good natural-resource decisionmaking. “Significant natural resources” were defined as “natural resources that require separate natural resource components in resource management plans or are otherwise considered ‘significant’ from a management point of view.” This standard was specific enough to provide some guidance but squishy enough to allow for managerial discretion. At the time, 225 NPS units were determined to contain significant natural resources.

As the results of the I&M questionnaire and NRAAP demonstrated, the gap between where the agency stood and where it intended to go was gargantuan. Not only did most parks lack a complete set of natural-resource inventories, most resource managers weren’t even sure which resources they had—let alone how they worked together, and which components deserved monitoring. Before a monitoring program could be designed, a park needed models of its natural systems—“exhaustive list[s] of mutually exclusive system components and a description of their relationships”—that provided an accounting of all major biotic and abiotic resources and the processes by which they interacted. From that list, representative elements could be selected and tested for monitoring, and the adequacy of existing resource inventories could be evaluated.¹¹ Only a handful of parks had a handful of models.

The HTF proposed a ten-year plan for overcoming those deficiencies and preparing parks for monitoring. Between FY1992 and FY1999, the servicewide I&M program would complete basic natural resource inventories for the 225 NPS units with significant natural resources. The inventories were expected to cost $1.2–16 million annually, depending on how many were done each year. Parks whose inventories were closest to completion would be given highest priority, allowing them to serve as models for what a fully inventoried park would look like. Parks whose inventories were furthest from completion would be scheduled next. A park’s size and biogeographic area would also be considered during scheduling, with the goal of creating a microcosmic representation of National Park System biodiversity as soon as possible. At the same time, a panel of internal and external experts would be convened to assess the state of park inventories and create the conceptual ecosystem models, at an expected cost of $100,000–740,000 for each of the next five years (FY1991–1995). Existing funding was expected to cover the first two years of inventory evaluation and model development. “Only a very limited amount” of funding was available for the inventories.¹²

In a parallel effort, the HTF called for “comprehensive monitoring programs” to be implemented in a handful of pilot parks. Two programs would be established each year from FY1992 to FY1995, following the design methodology used in the Western Region (e.g., Channel Islands). This would result in a total of eight programs, at an estimated cost of $1.5 million in FY1992 (for the first two parks), increasing to a total of $8.9 million by FY2000. An additional $450,000 would be needed for administrative and coordination overhead each year, along with $600,000 in infrastructure for each of the first four years.¹³ To keep start-up costs low and maximize the chances for success, preference would be given to parks already experienced with I&M activities. To ensure the experiences of pilot parks would be broadly applicable across the National Park System, the pilot program would strive to choose parks representing different biogeographic areas. Starting in FY1995, after the first eight programs were operational, monitoring designs would be developed for an additional 20% of the 225 parks each year, based on those developed for the pilot parks. Design costs were anticipated to range from an additional $3–3.8 million per year.¹⁴

At the urging of task force member Phil Brueck, the HTF took special care to ensure that smaller parks were not left behind. Brueck was superintendent of Prince William Forest Park, a 16,000-acre recreational enclave adjacent to Marine Corps Base Quantico in northern Virginia. Educated as a social scientist, Brueck was strongly interested in the prospect of science-based park management.¹⁵ He realized that on their own, small parks often lacked the staff and money to support a monitoring program. But by pooling their assets, a group of small parks could approximate the capacity of a large park. In its report, the HTF called for “at least one cluster of smaller parks” to be established as a monitoring unit—the first official reference to the monitoring “network” concept that would later come to define the entire program. A November update to the plan indicated a cluster of nine “Prairie Parks” planned for the Midwest Region, along with an expanded list of other possible pilot parks (see Appendix B).¹⁶

Finally, the HTF acknowledged the need for an integrated data management system. Because most parks were expected to have their own monitoring programs, it was expected that I&M data would be housed at individual parks. But the authors recognized the need for park data to be combined with those of other parks, and aggregated at the servicewide level. Because such a system would have to suit the needs of monitoring programs that didn’t yet exist, the authors proposed that database design not begin until FY1993. No cost estimate was provided and, as was true of the monitoring program and much of the inventories, it was unclear how the effort would be paid for. As a parting thought, the HTF warned that “actual budget enactments . . . will require periodic reevaluation of the proposed program.”¹⁷

All told, resource inventories were expected to cost about $68 million over 10 years. A fully implemented I&M program was expected to cost about $200 million annually. Given that the entire Congressional appropriation for the National Park Service was about $769 million in 1990, the program was either going to need a massive cash infusion or be forced to develop a more sustainable operations model. Or maybe both.¹⁸

For the time being, though, a small number of parks were benefitting from a limited pool of funds set aside for the I&M initiative. In the months following the Evison Report, the NPS had, for the first time, allocated $660,000 in Natural Resource Preservation Program funding to start expanding inventory and monitoring activities servicewide. In the past, such funds had been appropriated for special I&M projects at individual parks. In 1987, for instance, $500,000 was devoted to inventory and monitoring surveys and studies in 11 Alaska parks, focusing on wolves, fisheries, sheep, moose, and forestry. At Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, 13 inventories and studies were underway in 1987, intended to identify particularly vulnerable ecosystems.¹⁹ In contrast to these projects, the $660,000 obtained in fiscal year 1988 was recognized as part of the new initiative to conduct such work systematically across the National Park System. It was channeled into I&M activities at eight of the pilot parks proposed in the Evison Report: Acadia, Channel Islands, Glacier, Great Smoky Mountains, Isle Royale, Olympic, and Sequoia–Kings Canyon.²⁰

Isle Royale, a national park with a long history of research activities, had many existing datasets but lacked the staff to do systematic inventories of key resources, nor to do the type of monitoring necessary to document and track ecosystem health. With a total of $86,000 in FY88 and $30,000 of I&M funds over the next two years, the park was able to relocate, mark, and create a database for 447 plots used in previous research (allowing future studies to capitalize on past work); develop a multi-layer geographic information system; and host a workshop exploring the possibility of integrating existing spatial and temporal data into a management-based ecosystem model. In the broader sense, the infusion of I&M funding gave the park something even more valuable: a unifying framework for conceptualizing activities it was already doing. As resource management specialist Robert Krumenaker explained:

Prior to 1988, the park never used the phrase “Inventory and Monitoring.” Nevertheless, when added together it would appear that we have a fairly extensive program of regular resource monitoring already in place, primarily focused on key wildlife species. The nature of these activities has never been systematically planned, catalogued, nor critiqued, until now.²¹

Channel Islands National Park also used its funds from the Washington I&M initiative to bring order and structure to existing datasets, by developing an integrated system for improved data management and a geographic information system for data display and analysis.²²

If shoring up existing datasets sounds like a somewhat mundane way to spend monies awarded to fund an exciting new servicewide initiative, it’s important to remember that both the Evison and HTF reports had recommended the program begin by helping parks already doing I&M to more fully develop their existing programs into proof-of-concept examples. And in reality, a one-time allocation of $660,000, split eight ways, with no guarantee of subsequent funding, wasn’t enough to build a program on. The nature of the funding dictated it be spent on finite projects.

More importantly, there was a strong sense of urgency surrounding the need for improved data management in the National Park Service in 1988. In 1987, the journal Nature had published a short but groundshaking letter in which University of Michigan PhD student William Newmark argued that due to their limited size, U.S. national parks were analogous to land-bridge islands, in which habitat isolation frequently led the rate of species extinction to exceed the rate of colonization. In a review of “park sighting records and the literature” for 14 western parks in the US and Canada, Newmark concluded that 42 species had gone extinct from those parks since their establishment, while only three colonizations had occurred. Lassen Volcanic National Park, he asserted, had lost 43% of its lagomorphs, carnivores, and artiodactyls in the past 77 years. Based on his results, Newmark—who, citing Fauna No. 1, had previously written about the mismatch between the legal boundaries of eight major national parks and the biotic needs of wildlife—concluded that “virtually all western North American national parks were too small to maintain the mammalian faunal assemblage found at time of park establishment.” At a time when NPS policy was still dedicated to the post-Leopold model of restoring landscapes and then “letting nature take its course,” Newmark warned that avoiding future faunal loss would require active wildlife management and significant boundary expansion.²³

Newmark’s findings appeared amid “one of the most heated controversies in conservation history,” known as the SLOSS debate.²⁴ At issue was the question of whether “Single Large or Several Small” (SLOSS) habitat reserves were more effective for preserving biodiversity. In 1975, scientific writer Jared Diamond had published an article applying E.O. Wilson’s theory of island biogeography (which posited that the number of species on any island reflected a balance between the rate of colonization by new species and the rate of extinction of established species) to the optimal design of nature reserves. In simple terms, Diamond argued that because “larger reserves, and reserves located close to other reserves, can hold more species,” bigger was better.²⁵ Diamond’s argument made intuitive sense and was subsequently supported by many prominent conservation biologists, such as Stanford biologist Bruce Wilcox,²⁶ who warned of the devastating threats posed by habitat fragmentation. But Wilson’s student Daniel Simberloff questioned Diamond’s application of the theory. Simberloff maintained that the “single large” approach was built on a number of unverified assumptions and unproven by the mathematics used to support it. In his view, island-biogeography theory was “completely neutral with respect to SLOSS,” because “the same species-area relationship cited by advocates of single large preserves could as well be adduced in support of several small ones.”²⁷ In 1986, Simberloff and conservation biologist Michael Soulé proposed that the entire SLOSS debate was an ecological oversimplification. Determining the appropriate configuration of biological reserves required a far more subtle analysis of multiple factors and relationships than were accounted for in reductive arguments over “one big versus many small.”²⁸

Newmark’s Nature piece heavily cited the work of Diamond and Wilcox. But regardless of one’s position on the SLOSS debate, the policy implications of Newmark’s findings for the National Park Service were shocking: first, that the agency was largely failing to meet its most basic mandate of protecting park wildlife, and second, that without major philosophical and geographic changes, it could not hope to succeed in the future.

But other researchers familiar—and associated—with Newmark’s areas of study saw, in his conclusions, evidence of an entirely different problem. What Newmark had discovered, they contended, was not extinction. It was shambolic data management—where data existed at all. At the Third Biennial Conference on Research in California’s National Parks the following year, several presenters used the moment created by Newmark’s findings to draw attention to the bureau’s historically haphazard approach to science and scientific recordkeeping. Newmark had acknowledged his methodology was impacted by the questionable state of the information available to him, citing the “non-standardized nature” of the sighting records, “potential misidentification of species by observers,” and a “lack of equivalent sampling effort between parks.”²⁹ But at the research conference, James Quinn, of the University of California­–Davis, and Charles van Riper, of Northern Arizona University’s Cooperative Park Studies Unit, argued that the quality and management of NPS data were so poor that Newmark’s results couldn’t be trusted:

Fortunately, most of these “extinctions” appear to be due to poor inventories, or at least lack of accessible sighting records, rather than actual disappearances. On reexamination of the available information, Quinn et al. (1990) concluded that no more than three of the 39 apparent “extinctions” represented actual disappearances of the animals from the parks and their immediate environs. . . . the fact that the controversy could arise at all, especially in species as “popular” as large mammals, suggests that all is not well with present inventory information in the national parks.³⁰

Quinn and van Riper co-authored four papers for the conference. Three had two sources in common: Newmark’s “Letter” and its supporting work (mentioned more than 30 times throughout the proceedings) and their own “Quinn et al. (1990),” titled, “Mammalian extinctions in national parks in the western United States: A reply to Newmark.” This article was qualified as being “in press.”

In their research for “A reply to Newmark,” Quinn, van Riper, and US Forest Service biologist Hal Salwasser had interviewed staff at 12 of the parks where Newmark reported extinctions. They found that “when the actual status of each of these species was checked with certain NPS biologists, managers, and other experts, it was found that for 21 of the 39 cases of “extinction” identified by Newmark, there had been confirmed sightings of the species within the parks in the last 5–10 years.”³¹ The manuscript was never published, but their findings—that one could obtain vastly different information on the presence or absence of park species depending on where they looked and who they talked to—indicated that problems with NPS resource knowledge went beyond a lack of basic information about park species. Even where natural resource data did exist, they were unreliable and incomparable.³²

To demonstrate the pervasiveness of the issue, Quinn and van Riper participated in two comparative analyses of inventory data from national parks in California, focusing on birds and mammals. The examination of bird databases found “enormous variability” among parks in both species counts and the types of species recorded. No two parks reported abundance, residency, and nesting data the same way. The authors concluded that using the available data in its current state to assess interpark patterns or develop conservation strategies would be “difficult at best.”³³

The analysis of mammal inventories examined species-occurrence data by comparing park lists with lists other researchers had derived entirely or in part from park records. Again, they found broad inconsistencies in the park data, ranging from lists that contained only verified sightings to lists that included species for which there were no actual records of occurrence. Other lists were of “representative” park species. Only four of 16 lists were annotated. Three provided only common names (which can vary by geographic region and even from person to person). Only one list identified mammals to subspecies.³⁴ The authors concluded that any researcher attempting to obtain an accurate picture of a park’s species information would have to both search in many different places and identify the proper personnel to provide anecdotal accounts of observations.

In May 1991, Jim Quinn and ecologist Tom Stohlgren, of UC-Davis’s Cooperative National Park Resources Studies Unit, expanded the work done in California to 40 Western Region parks. Using Lassen Volcanic National Park (identified by Newmark as having had the largest proportional species loss) as their pilot, Stohlgren and Quinn had biological technicians interview park staff and evaluate the taxonomic, geographic, ecological, and seasonal completeness of inventories (where extant) for each of six biological groups: vascular plants, mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians. They also collected information about the inventories, references, and status of voucher specimens; recorded the number of recently discovered species and confirmed or possible extirpations; and catalogued information on park maps and imagery. A numerical composite score summarized the status of knowledge for each biological group and allowed comparison among parks and biological groups.³⁵ Lower scores were better. Higher scores indicated a considerable knowledge gap.

They found that only up to one-quarter of surveyed parks had species inventories that were “at least 95% complete. In nearly all parks, existing information . . . was an amalgamation of opportunistic observations, unvalidated range maps, or, in some cases, surveys conducted by the Wildlife Division in the 1930s.”³⁶ Even systematic surveys from parks with strong research programs had limitations. Vegetation surveys for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks included more than 1,500 “unknowns,” because the park “lacked the expertise or funds to identify them.” Data on marine ecosystems at Channel Islands National Park were taxonomically and ecologically complete but geographically restricted to specific areas and ocean depths. This was a common problem, because surveys were often completed relative to specific projects or species of interest, leaving large portions of parks undocumented.

Assembling the information needed for Stohlgren and Quinn’s study was a challenge in itself. Only three parks (Channel Islands, Sequoia/Kings, and Great Basin National Park) of the 40 surveyed had indexed, working bibliographies of past research. Elsewhere, historic information and voucher specimens were scattered across multiple offices and storage areas, not meeting any imaginable standards for data management. One park’s herbarium was described as “50? specimens . . . in a cardboard box in park, location unknown.” Information on maps and imagery was no better: poorly organized, of limited geographic range, low-resolution, and not groundtruthed. In sum, Stohlgren and Quinn found it was “difficult to assess” the status of information across the 40 surveyed parks.

Large parks generally fared better than small parks. With scores ranging from about 6 to 16 in the rubric, the median composite score of the 40 parks was around 11. Of the parks that scored 11 or higher (that is, those with the largest information gaps), 81% had an area of less than 100 square miles.³⁷ Stohlgren and Quinn explained this as being partially a consequence of smaller parks having smaller budgets for research and resource activities. This was worrisome to Stohlgren, who believed that in toto, small parks represented a greater share of the National Park System’s biodiversity than large parks. Smaller parks were also more susceptible to threats, such as urbanization, habitat fragmentation, invasive species, low genetic diversity, and fire suppression.³⁸

In October 1991, Stohlgren took these concerns to a meeting of the I&M Advisory Committee (IMAC), a 14-member group of superintendents, scientists, and resource specialists who met biannually to assist with program development and implementation.³⁹ The main event on the October agenda was selection of the first four pilot, or “prototype,” parks for the Long-Term Ecological Monitoring (LTEM) program—the M in I&M.⁴⁰ But as the participants geared up for that exciting task, Stohlgren reminded them that the “I” was worthy of equal enthusiasm. Echoing the “several small” side of the SLOSS debate, he urged those assembled to look at the big picture: Because of the potential for multiple small parks to include more biodiversity than singular, large parks, a small investment in inventorying small parks would provide more immediate value to biological conservation than large investments in monitoring large, well-funded parks. Ensuring that all “natural area” parks had a basic level of resource information would improve park management and bring many parks “up to a level of resource awareness that the public has already assumed we have achieved.”⁴¹

This allusion to the public trust was a powerful reminder that although the parks’ lack of resource information had long been common knowledge in the NPS, the general public would likely be shocked to learn that staff at 80% of “natural area” parks lacked even a basic understanding of which species they managed. To begin to alleviate the problem, Stohlgren proposed a “Pilot Parks Inventory Program” that would provide each pilot park with “standardized field techniques, species lists, species abundance and distribution data, a new vegetation map, and GIS hardware and software.” He estimated the cost of this program at $65,000 annually for three years, or “5–10 times less than a pilot parks monitoring program.”⁴²

If it seems odd that Stohlgren would feel the need to continue lobbying for inventories even after the I&M program was established, it may be because the minimal funding available placed its two main components in competition for dollars. As longtime program lead Gary Williams recalled, there was often a push-and-pull between program advisors who were stronger advocates of either inventories or monitoring. Especially at the start, some inventory advocates felt monitoring was getting a disproportionate amount of attention—and the budget. In fiscal year 1992, about 32% of the program’s total budget was programmed for inventories. Williams recounted that at one early IMAC meeting, “I&M” was written on a chalkboard at the front of the room. After a break, the members returned to find someone had erased the original letters and replaced them with a tiny “I” and giant “M,” expressing the sentiment that inventories were not getting the enthusiasm they deserved.⁴³

In truth, for many people, neither activity conjured a particularly dynamic mental image. For Alaska Region Chief Scientist Al Lovaas, who had helped formulate the Evison Report, the word “inventory” was “a downer,” bringing to mind tedium, boredom, and potential terror—what if something turned up missing? Monitoring, on the other hand, was “the life blood of an agency,” and implied action. In a letter to Park Science, Lovaas urged the program to abandon any mention of the I-word (while retaining inventorying as an activity), and adopt a three-word moniker that paralleled those of existing programs: “Natural Resource Monitoring,” to be a triumvirate partner with Natural Resource Research and Natural Resource Management (still operated as largely separate entities, though some parks had begun to combine their functions into the same division).⁴⁴ On the other hand, in 1980, “monitoring” had been euphemized as “repeated inventories” in the Channel Islands enabling legislation, in part because “monitoring” sounded boring and not everyone considered it science.⁴⁵

As Lovaas pointed out, inventory and monitoring also had a temporal problem:

The primary reason I&M has not worked . . . is that it is aimed at the future, while we want—or have—to focus on today's problems and needs. . . . [I&M] is an attempt to break away from the work-a-day world to gather data about baselines and changes—needed for future decisions.

In a world where results are expected to be immediate, and dollars are considered wasted unless they result in a tangible product, a program whose goal is to collect information forever, because it will be useful in currently indeterminate ways, is still a difficult sell. Investing in anything now, for the benefit of future generations, is challenging—but it’s precisely what the NPS was created to do. As former Glacier National Park superintendent Jeff Mow frequently said, the park service is “in the forever business.” In this way, I&M, with its focus on securing a healthy future for park ecosystems, is a logical extension of the NPS ideal.

But that didn’t make it any easier to fund. From the start, there was a significant gap between the ambitions proposed for the I&M program and any ability to pay for them. The Evison Report had suggested I&M be supported with reallocated base funds and “new funding as required.”⁴⁶ The NRAAP report, which called for at least 100 parks to develop I&M programs by 1993, imagined they would be paid for with “requested increases to base funding,” director’s discretionary funds, re-directed base funding, and revenue from 10–20% of park entrance and user fees.⁴⁷ A November update on projects associated with the HTF report indicated that servicewide, only 3% of anticipated inventory costs could be met with existing funding available from regional offices.⁴⁸ And when I&M got its first major allocation of $1.9 million in fiscal year 1992, it was thanks to a Congressionally approved renewal and reallocation of expiring NPS project funds. So far, no plan had suggested an adequate basis for supporting a long-term program intended to persist “forever.”

A permanent program dependent on positive relationships with park staff could not subsist on a combination of wishes, annual discretionary funds, and monies taken away from the very park managers it purported to help. In a 1991 article for the NPS professional journal, Ranger, Robert Krumenaker made this point explicit when he identified I&M as one of “the various special initiatives” that was making it even more difficult than usual to obtain funding for basic resource management activities.⁴⁹ Krumenaker went on to recount the ways in which the NPS budget cycle and funding structure prioritized short-term projects and research over long-term implementation of solutions and preventive action—an institutional hurdle that would be difficult, but crucial for a long-term monitoring program to overcome.

“Planning without funding is just conversation,” former NPS Director George Hartzog is rumored to have quipped.⁵⁰ But in the absence of a long-term funding solution, I&M planning proceeded under the assumption that the rain would follow the plow. With support finally coming from the top levels of NPS administration, momentum building at the park level, and $2 million to get started, there was no reason to stop now.

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

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¹In December 1986, the National Park Service announced that several top-level, career NPS officials would be shuffled around as part of an effort to “place more emphasis on providing recreation and special amenities for visitors and less emphasis on protecting wildlife and other natural resources in the parks,” a move strongly detrimental to morale across the NPS. Reportedly forced into retirement, Western Regional Director Howard Chapman echoed a widely-held opinion that the Reagan administration’s political appointees were “dismembering the professional capability of the National Park Service at the national, regional and park level.” Philip Shabecoff, “U.S. Park Service Roiled by Change,” New York Times, December 20, 1986, https://www.nytimes.com/1986/12/20/us/us-park-service-roiled-by-change.html.

²Gene Hester, “Gene Hester,” LinkedIn, accessed October 7, 2020, https://www.linkedin.com/in/gene-hester-49165476.

³Abigail Miller, interview by Alice Wondrak Biel and Margaret Beer, January 15, 2020; Robert J. Krumenaker and Abigail Miller, “The Natural Resource Management Challenge: The NR-MAP Report,” March 3, 1995.

⁴Gene Hester, “Servicewide Program For I&M Underway,” Park Science: A Resource Management Bulletin 8, no. 1 (Fall 1987): 15.

⁵Derived from F. Eugene Hester to Regional Directors and Superintendents, “Results of Inventorying and Monitoring Questionnaire,” Memorandum, March 30, 1989, http://npshistory.com/natural_resources.htm.

⁶Andrea Jauck Chynoweth and Gordon Cooper Olson, “Assateague Island Natural Resources Inventory & Monitoring Program Analysis” (Berlin, Maryland: Assateague Island National Seashore, October 1990), 1.

⁷National Park Service, “Natural Resources Assessment and Action Program” (Washington, DC: Office of Natural Resources, March 1988). 2, 5.

⁸Miller, interview by Biel and Beer.

⁹National Park Service, “Management Policies: US Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1988,” December 1988, 4:4.

¹⁰National Park Service, “Inventory and Monitoring Program,” April 1990, 2, http://npshistory.com/publications/interdisciplinary/im/im-program-1.pdf.

¹¹Albert Greene, Jr., Gary Davis, and David Haskell, “Draft Guidelines Natural Resources Inventory and Monitoring for the National Park System,” March 28, 1989, 11–12.

¹²National Park Service, “Inventory and Monitoring Program,” 3.

¹³National Park Service, “Inventory and Monitoring Program,” 4.

¹⁴National Park Service, “Inventory and Monitoring Program,” 4.

¹⁵Phil Brueck, “Phil Brueck,” accessed October 8, 2020, https://www.linkedin.com/in/phil-brueck-8078ab20; Miller, interview by Biel and Beer.

¹⁶F. Eugene Hester to Directorate and Field Directorate, “Update on FY90 Servicewide Inventory and Monitoring (I&M) Program,” Memorandum, November 1990, File “Monitoring Task Forces,” Inventory & Monitoring Division, Ft. Collins, Colorado.

¹⁷National Park Service, “Inventory and Monitoring Program,” 5.

¹⁸Hester to Directorate and Field Directorate, “Update on FY90 Servicewide Inventory and Monitoring (I&M) Program,” November 1990.Gary E. Davis, “Monitoring Case Studies Selected,” Park Science: A Resource Management Bulletin 10, no. 4 (Fall 1990): 1; Shenandoah National Park, “Natural Resource Inventory and Long-Term Ecological Monitoring System Plan for Shenandoah National Park,” August 1991, 9; Office of Management and Budget, “Budget of the United States Government: Fiscal Year 1992” (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, February 4, 1991), Part 4–114, https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/budget-united-states-government-54/fiscal-year-1992-18998/content/pdf/bus_1992_sec5.

¹⁹“Senate Hearings Before the Committee on Appropriations, Department Of the Interior and Related Agencies Appropriations, Fiscal Year 1988,” § Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations United States Senate (1987), 644, 646.

²⁰National Park Service, “Natural Resources Assessment and Action Program”; Robert J. Krumenaker et al., “An Evaluation of the Inventory and Monitoring Program Isle Royale National Park, Michigan,” December 1990; F. Eugene Hester, “Update on FY90 Servicewide Inventory and Monitoring (I&M) Program,” November 1990, File “Monitoring Task Forces,” Inventory & Monitoring Division, Ft. Collins, Colorado.

²¹Krumenaker et al., “An Evaluation of the Inventory and Monitoring Program Isle Royale National Park, Michigan,” 3.

²²Gary Davis and William Halvorson, “Channel Islands National Park Natural Resources Monitoring Program: 1990 Status Report” (National Park Service Cooperative Parks Study Unit, University of California, Davis, December 15, 1990), 12.

²³William D. Newmark, “A Land-Bridge Perspective on Mammalian Extinctions in Western North American Parks,” Nature 325 (January 29, 1987): 430–432; William D. Newmark, “Legal and Biotic Boundaries of Western North American National Parks: A Problem of Congruence,” Biological Conservation 33 (1985): 197–208.

²⁴Jennifer Bove, “The SLOSS Debate,” Treehugger, August 27, 2018, https://www.treehugger.com/overview-of-the-sloss-debate-1181943.

²⁵Paul Ehrlich, David S. Dobkin, and Darryl Wheye, “Island Biogeography,” 1988, https://web.stanford.edu/group/stanfordbirds/text/essays/Island_Biogeography.html. Jared M. Diamond, “The Island Dilemma: Lessons of Modern Biogeographic Studies for the Design of Natural Reserves,” Biological Conservation 7 (1975), 129, http://jareddiamond.org/Jared_Diamond/Further_Reading_files/Diamond%201975.pdf.

²⁶Wilcox was part of the advisory group that generated the Evison Report.

²⁷Daniel S. Simberloff and Lawrence G. Abele, “Island Biogeography Theory and Conservation Practice,” Science 191, no. 4224 (January 23, 1976), 285; Daniel S. Simberloff and Lawrence G. Abele, “Refuge Design and Island Biogeographic Theory: Effects of Fragmentation,” The American Naturalist 120, no. 1 (July 1982): 41–50.

²⁸Michael E. Soule and Daniel Simberloff, “What Do Genetics and Ecology Tell Us about the Design of Nature Reserves?,” Biological Conservation 35, no. 1 (1986): 19–40. In another 1986 paper, Newmark concurred, writing, “The answer to SLOSS is heavily dependent upon the objectives of a reserve, the autecology of the species, and the ecological independence of the reserves.” William D. Newmark, “Species-Area Relationship and Its Determinants for Mammals in Western North American National Parks,” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 28 (1986): 83–98.

²⁹Newmark, “A Land-Bridge Perspective,” 431.

³⁰James F. Quinn and Charles van Riper III, “Design Considerations for National Park Inventory Databases,” in Examples of Resource Inventory and Monitoring in National Parks of California: Proceedings of the Third Biennial Conference, vol. 8, Transactions and Proceedings Series (Third Biennial Conference on Research in California’s National Parks, University of California, Davis, California: National Park Service, 1988), 6, http://npshistory.com/series/symposia/8/proceedings.pdf.

³¹Frederic H. Wagner et al., Wildlife Policies in the U.S. National Parks (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995), 63; Rosamonde R. Cook, James F. Quinn, and Charles van Riper III, “A Comparative Analysis of Mammal Inventory Data for California’s National Parks,” n.d., 73.

³²As explained by Frederic Wagner and co-authors that included Hal Salwasser, the manuscript for “A Reply to Newmark” was submitted to Ecology but eventually withdrawn. In 1993, Newmark confirmed he had “recheck[ed] the species records with park officials and verif[ied] most of his original conclusions.” Frederic H. Wagner et al., Wildlife Policies in the U.S. National Parks (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995), 63–64.

³³Raymond M. Sauvajot et al., “Comparative Analyses of Bird Inventory Databases from California National Parks,” in Examples of Resource Inventory and Monitoring in National Parks of California: Proceedings of the Third Biennial Conference, vol. 8, Transactions and Proceedings Series (Third Biennial Conference on Research in California’s National Parks, University of California, Davis, California: National Park Service, 1988), 15–48, http://npshistory.com/series/symposia/8/proceedings.pdf.

³⁴Cook, Quinn, and van Riper III, “A Comparative Analysis of Mammal Inventory Data for California’s National Parks.”

³⁵Stohlgren and Quinn, “Status of Natural Resources Databases in National Parks: Western Region.”

³⁶Stohlgren and Quinn, 9. In 1983, staff from Great Smoky Mountains National Park’s Uplands Field Research Laboratory co-authored a paper examining the resource information available to managers at the 14 International Biosphere Reserve units managed by the NPS, with similar results. Via telephone survey, managers were asked about the completeness of each reserve’s baseline resource inventories, long-term monitoring, and long-term ecological research. Eight of the areas reported having 10% or less of the research they needed. Programs were more complete at NPS units with in-park research laboratories and scientists than at those without. Alison Mack et al., “A Survey of Ecological Inventory, Monitoring, and Research in US National Park Service Biosphere Reserves,” Biological Conservation 26, no. 1 (May 1983): 33–45.

³⁷Information derived from Stohlgren and Quinn, “Status of Natural Resources Databases in National Parks: Western Region,” 41.

³⁸Thomas J. Stohlgren, “A Pilot Parks Inventory Program.” When Stohlgren and Quinn expanded their study to include 252 NPS units across the nation, they again found a correlation between park size and lack of available resource knowledge. Servicewide, most parks had some species lists, but 80% were less than 80% complete taxonomically, geographically, and ecologically. For all categories except vascular plants, the most oft-reported status park staff used to describe park inventories was “poor to non-existent.” The inadequate historic recordkeeping and lack of standardization in data collection seen in the Western Region were also found to be pervasive through the rest of the National Park System, as was the disproportionate emphasis on “popular” taxa. Overall, the biodiversity data available to most national parks was thought to be less than 50% complete, meaning “decisions affecting park resources are made without sufficient biological information.” Thomas J. Stohlgren et al., “Status of Biotic Inventories in U.S. National Parks,” Biological Conservation 71, no. 1 (1995): 97–106.

³⁹Gary Williams, “Servicewide Inventory and Monitoring Information Bulletin,” December 1992.

⁴⁰Gary Williams, “Inventory and Monitoring Program Initiated,” 1991 Highlights of Natural Resources Management, Natural Resources Report NPS/NRPO/NRR-92/07, 1992, 6.

⁴¹Stohlgren, “A Pilot Parks Inventory Program,” 3.

⁴²Stohlgren, 3.

⁴³Gary Williams, interview by Alice Wondrak Biel and Margaret Beer, November 20, 2019; Gary Williams, interview by Alice Wondrak Biel and Margaret Beer, June 10, 2020.

⁴⁴Al Lovaas, “A Pertinent Letter from Alaska?,” Park Science: A Resource Management Bulletin 10, no. 4 (Fall 1990): 21; Robert J. Krumenaker, “Resource Management And Research In The NPS: An Uneasy Relationship,” Ranger: The Journal of the Association of National Park Rangers VII, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 10–14, 23.

⁴⁵Davis, interview; Shenandoah National Park, “Natural Resource Inventory and Long-Term Ecological Monitoring System Plan for Shenandoah National Park,” 2.

⁴⁶Graber et al., “Evison Report,” 9.

⁴⁷National Park Service, “Natural Resources Assessment and Action Program,” 5.

⁴⁸Hester to Directorate and Field Directorate, “Update on FY90 Servicewide Inventory and Monitoring (I&M) Program,” November 1990.

⁴⁹Krumenaker, “Resource Management And Research In The NPS: An Uneasy Relationship,” 14.

⁵⁰Thomas J. Stohlgren to Alice Wondrak Biel, “A Few More Questions from Way Back,” July 1, 2020.

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