I&M Administrative History: Getting to Work

In October 1991, the IMAC selected the first four national parks for the prototype monitoring program: Channel Islands, Shenandoah, Great Smoky Mountains, and Denali. Although the Hester Task Force had estimated that $1.2 million would be required to initiate monitoring at two parks, there was about $1 million dollars in I&M funds available to split between the four, supplemented by $700,000 from regional and park funds. The parks were selected based on two main factors: (1) biogeographical representation (they represented three diverse bioregions), and (2) readiness for monitoring, as determined by the completeness of their inventory information, engagement in ongoing research and monitoring, and possession of scientific personnel and adequate park infrastructure. They had competed with other parks via technical and cost proposals.¹

By this time, Channel Islands was well into monitoring kelp forests, rocky intertidal areas, seabirds, and pinnipeds. Initial prototype funds bolstered that existing monitoring and supported program administration, bat inventories, information management, and marine-debris monitoring, with future plans for monitoring terrestrial species. In 1993, the park began to develop protocols for monitoring water quality and island foxes.²

Shenandoah had first started long-term monitoring of air quality in 1979.³ Five years later, park managers decided to initiate a comprehensive program of ecosystem inventory and monitoring. By 1992, park staff were learning about the dynamics of Shenandoah’s macroinvertebrates, watersheds, and forests using a system of permanent plots and transects. The park also made extensive use of GIS for landscape monitoring. Though some projects had been inspired by specific resource concerns, such as the arrival of exotic gypsy moths and adjacent land development, Shenandoah’s I&M program was designed to provide managers with a “fundamental understanding of natural resources and processes that is essential to the development of management and mitigating actions.”⁴ Prototype funds would be used to implement additional monitoring protocols for multiple flora and fauna, and expand the use of GIS. In 1993, the prototype program included projects on water quality, air quality, meteorology, forest communities, rare plants, black bears, birds, fish, amphibians, and aquatic macroinvertebrates.⁵

Recognized as one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, Great Smoky Mountains National Park was part of an International Biosphere Reserve designated by UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere (MAB) program. Created in 1970, MAB is an intergovernmental program intended to promote sustainable development, improve human–environment relationships, and “solv[e] management problems arising from” those relationships.”⁶ Its network of International Biosphere Reserves are protected areas that provide for research, conservation, and training activities related to MAB goals. By 1992, all or part of 29 NPS units (also including Channel Islands and Denali) were part of this program.⁷ In 1976, MAB had chosen Great Smoky Mountains as the first site of a pilot project for long-term ecological monitoring in biosphere reserves; in 1978, the park hosted an international workshop on the subject.⁸ As home to the Uplands Field Research Laboratory, the park also had a strong science program independent of MAB activities. The first year of prototype funds allowed the park to hire a computer specialist and biological technician; purchase vehicles, computers, data loggers, and environmental monitors; and undertake a data management plan. In 1993, the prototype program included projects on water quality, black bears, white-tailed deer, rare plants, forest exotics, fisheries, aquatic macroinvertebrates, and other aquatic biota.⁹

As the most-studied of the little-studied Alaska parks, Denali National Park and Preserve was the fourth prototype selected. Although previous proposals for I&M activities in Alaska had included all 23 Alaska Region parks—in part because their extreme, fragile arctic and subarctic environments were expected to be canaries in the coal mine for the effects of climate change—the plan was subsequently scaled back to include only Denali—as both the most accessible park, and the one with the most extant data.¹⁰ The plan divided the 6 million-acre park according to three major watersheds (later changed to five) representing its major terrestrial habitats, aquatic systems, and climatic regimes. One watershed would be sampled each year. In 1993, the prototype program included projects on glaciers, climate, soils mapping, water quality, invertebrates, vegetation, birds, small mammals, and macroinvertebrates.¹¹

Now, the servicewide I&M program had a mission, a plan, and four study areas. It had support from the agency’s highest levels and at the park scale. It had draft guidelines, and even some funding. What it didn’t have was a dedicated leader. Since November 1990, Deputy Associate Director for Natural Resources Denny Fenn had been coordinating the program at the national level.¹² But a program of the intended scale of I&M would need its own lead, and in January 1992, Gary Williams was hired into the position. Williams came to the NPS from the Bureau of Reclamation in Denver, where he was a staff ecologist coordinating inventory and mapping of wetlands. When he heard about the position, the I&M job was enticing except for one thing: it was based in Washington, DC. Williams really didn’t want to move to Washington, so he completed the application and carried it around for a week, finally sending it off only after convincing himself that because the NPS usually promoted from within, he probably didn’t have a shot, anyway. Williams was also aware that several of the divisions I&M would work closely with—GIS, water resources, air resources—were located in Colorado, so he was hopeful he could arrange to have the I&M position stationed there as well. But during his interview, Fenn said no. After taking the weekend to think it over, Williams decided the opportunity was too good to pass up. When Fenn called to offer him the job, Williams took it—and reluctantly moved to DC, with an office in the Main Interior building.¹³

Gary Williams was now the sole employee of a brand-new servicewide program, with the Evison Report, the Hester Task Force report, and a set of draft program guidelines to tell him what to do. By his own estimation, Williams was on the job about a month before a knock at his door revealed two men from the Department of the Interior’s Office of Inspector General. They had been sent to find out how the I&M program intended to help the park service correct the many problems identified in various internal and external reports released since 1980’s State of the Parks—which included the GAO’s unflattering 1987 follow-up to that report, the 1988 NRAAP report, and, in 1989, the National Parks Conservation Association’s widely publicized “National Parks: From Vignettes to a Global View,” which documented the NPS’s failure to embrace ecosystem management and provide adequate research for management decisions.¹⁴

Williams provided them with the broad view but realized he needed to start figuring out the details, and fast. So at the spring IMAC meeting—after he’d finished introducing himself—he divided the members into two subgroups, one focused on inventories and the other on monitoring (see Appendix A). Then the subgroups were sent to separate conference rooms with a single objective: to figure out how their respective portions of the I&M program would be functionally structured. Eventually, each group returned with a list. The inventories subgroup had agreed on 12 basic inventories every park should have:

• Species Lists
• Vegetation Maps
• Geology Maps
• Soils Maps
• Annotated Database/Bibliography [of natural resource studies and other information]
• Species Distribution Data
• Base Cartographic Maps
• Water Resource Classification
• Water Quality Data
• Air Quality Data
• Precipitation/Meteorology Data
• Air Monitoring Station Locations¹⁵

The list was strikingly similar to the preliminary list of resources proposed for inventory in the Evison Report (see Appendix C for comparison). Ten of the 12 inventories had a direct corollary in that earlier list.

The monitoring subgroup had taken the list of NPS units “with significant natural resources” and assigned each park to one of 16 (soon reformulated into 9) biogeographic associations.¹⁶ In keeping with the osmotic strategy laid out in previous documents, the plan was to select one prototype park from each biogeographic category, based on the assumption that all park units in the same category should have “certain ecological conditions in common,” making it probable that the knowledge gained about monitoring in one unit would be applicable to the others.¹⁷ Then, as funds became available, the other parks in that group would implement the monitoring initiated in the prototype park.

The outlines of the NPS I&M program were now visible. It would be a single program approached through two parallel efforts, with the overarching goal of improving the ecological data available to park managers for use in decisionmaking. One component would complete 12 basic inventories for each park with “significant natural resources.” Having the information from these inventories would correct multiple longstanding problems for NPS managers: inadequate resource knowledge, inequitable amounts of resource knowledge across parks of different sizes, levels of resource knowledge that depended on strong interest—or lack of interest—by a park’s superintendent, non-uniform datasets, incomplete datasets, datasets based on researcher interests, geographically limited datasets, datasets no one knew existed, redundant datasets. The inventories would be administered by the I&M program, which would review proposals, hire contractors, and distribute funds.

Once the inventories told the parks which resources comprised park ecosystems, the monitoring component of I&M would evaluate the health of those ecosystems over time, in perpetuity, providing a scientific basis for management actions and, ultimately, understanding broad-scale ecological change in the National Park System. Nine biogeographic regions and types would be seeded with prototype parks that would develop monitoring programs and then pass them on to “sister” parks in the same biogeographic category. To help parks become monitoring-ready, the I&M program intended to provide funding for 50 of them to develop conceptual models of their ecosystems, develop the necessary infrastructure to support long-term monitoring, and transfer knowledge from prototype parks to sister parks.¹⁸ Future prototype parks (or park clusters) would be selected based in part on their location in a bioregion not already represented in the program. After a bioregion was selected for inclusion, the 3–4 parks considered best suited to be prototypes would be invited to submit competitive proposals. Successful proposals would demonstrate scientific merit, park readiness, and evidence of ecosystem threats.¹⁹ Funds for prototype parks would come through the I&M program, which would then release the monies to parks. Eventually, the prototypes would be base-funded through the parks, themselves.

In December 1992, the IMAC recommended that six prototypes be selected in 1993, one in each of the remaining biogeographic categories. At least two should represent the “cluster” model suggested in the HTF report, and one of those clusters should be the next prototype implemented.²⁰ After a tenth bioregion was added to the list, seven new prototypes were selected, but only three would be funded by the end of the decade (see table below).

Table 2. Prototype long-term ecological monitoring parks and clusters, 1992–2000.

Prototype	Park(s)	Bioregion	Year selected	Year implemented
Channel Islands NP	Channel Islands NP	Pacific Coast	1991	1992
Shenandoah NP	Shenandoah NP	Deciduous Forest	1991	1992
Great Smoky Mountains NP	Great Smoky Mountains NP	Deciduous Forest	1991	1992
Denali NP&P	Denali NP&P	Arctic/Subarctic	1991	1992
Great Plains Prairie Cluster	Agate Fossil Beds NM Effigy Mounds NM Homestead NM Pipestone NM Scotts Bluff NM Wilsons Creek NB	Grasslands/Prairies	1993	1994
Cape Cod NS	Cape Cod NS	Atlantic/Gulf Coast	1993	1996
Virgin Islands-Southern Florida Cluster	Virgin Islands NP Buck Island Reef NM Dry Tortugas NP	Tropical/Subtropical	1993	1996
Northern Colorado Plateau Cluster	Arches NM Canyonlands NP Capitol Reef NP Dinosaur NM Natural Bridges NM	Arid Lands	1993	2000
Mammoth Cave NP	Mammoth Cave NP	Caves	1993	2000
Olympic NP	Olympic NP	Coniferous Forest	1993	2000
North Cascades NP	North Cascades NP	Lakes and Rivers	1993	2000

The fifth prototype, established in 1994, was the six-park Great Plains Prairie Cluster, which would later serve as the functional model for the 32 I&M networks. The Virgin Islands-Southern Florida Cluster followed, in 1996, along with a prototype at Cape Cod National Seashore. The remaining four prototypes would have to wait until more sizable, stable funding became available.

In July 1992, after a lot of revising by Gary Williams, the National Park Service released NPS-75, the Natural Resources Inventory and Monitoring Guideline. In his memo announcing its release, Associate Director Hester stated that NPS-75, along with the NPS Management Policies and NPS-77 (the Natural Resource Management Guideline), “should be considered as the fundamental references for our natural resource management program.”²¹

NPS-75 began with an explanation of why I&M was legally necessary, citing the NPS Management Policies, Yellowstone Organic Act, various executive orders, the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and other environmental legislation. It then identified the program’s long-term goals (below), asserting that attaining them was “the only avenue to ‘manage the natural resources of the national park system to maintain and perpetuate their inherent integrity,’” as the Management Policies required:

• Establish natural resource inventory and monitoring as a standard practice throughout the National Park system which transcends traditional program, activity, and funding boundaries.
• Inventory the natural resources and park ecosystems under National Park Service stewardship to determine their nature and status.
• Monitor park ecosystems to better understand their dynamic nature and condition and to provide reference points for comparisons with other, altered environments.
• Integrate natural resource inventory and monitoring information into National Park Service planning, management, and decisionmaking.
• Share National Park Service accomplishments and information with other natural resource organizations and form partnerships for attaining common goals and objectives.

The rest of the guideline strongly reflected the program’s historical influences. Echoing the Evison Report’s assertion that “I&M will require explicit cooperation at the field level, and the formal support of administration at every level,” NPS-75 assigned roles to everyone from the NPS director to park superintendents, research scientists, resource managers, law enforcement rangers, maintenance workers, and administrative staff.²² The guideline included a 10-year timeline (derived from the HTF), an implementation strategy similar to the plans laid out at the April IMAC meeting, and, in a nod to the Channel Islands program, a step-down diagram for developing conceptual models of ecosystems. Acknowledging there were no “universal, ‘off-the-shelf’” methods to assess ecosystems—and that the diversity of the national parks and their management issues precluded a uniform approach—NPS-75 offered some examples of how parks might approach monitoring, and then repeated a fundamental principle from the Evison Report: “Long-term monitoring must be base-funded and closely tracked at all organizational levels to assure continuity. The program cannot succeed over the long term—forever, in the context of the Park Service mandate—unless it is institutionalized fully at the level of park operations.”

Though it didn’t tell parks exactly how to implement monitoring, NPS-75 did provide a broad framework explaining where to begin, how to move on, and what kind of results to aspire to for two different types of monitoring: biological and chemical/geophysical. Programs were advised to move through three phases: Inventory, Monitoring, and Integration. Separate—and disparate—sections described what kinds of activities those phases should include, generally describing a process of collecting baseline information on park resources, gaining an understanding of how those resources functioned together and changed over time, and analyzing the information gathered to draw broader conclusions about ecosystem health.

These two sections (“Biological Resources Inventory and Monitoring” and “Chemical and Geophysical Resources Inventory and Monitoring”), which feel a bit out of place in the document, were a vestige of the earliest versions of NPS-75. Drafted immediately after the release of the Evison Report, and revised in 1988, these early drafts had coupled the philosophy of the Evison Report with the framework of MAB’s ecological monitoring program.²³ MAB identified variables of interest in four categories: chemical, geophysical, biological, and anthropological. For each category, three levels of desired effort were identified. At Level I, information gaps were identified and basic information collected on “keystone” parameters, akin to vital signs. At Level II, information collection continued and Level-I data were used to identify additional monitoring parameters. Level-III work involved “intense, sophisticated study of key aspects of the system,” and broadened the scale of research to include parameters “considered the most vital to human well-being and ecosystem functioning.” ²⁴ Ideally, the findings of a reserve’s Level-III research could be combined with those from other reserves to result in global analyses and solutions. These three levels were analogous to the three “phases” described in NPS-75; subsequent I&M documents would commonly revert to the MAB terminology, referring for instance, to “Level I inventories.”

The MAB framework made up the majority of the first draft of NPS-75. Its greatly diminished presence in the final version reflects the degree to which the NPS had, by that time, developed its own objectives, goals, and vision for the I&M program in accordance with the greatest needs of the agency. As program lead, Gary Williams had been responsible for turning the drafts, which had leaned toward a park-focused “here’s how” presentation of I&M, into a servicewide statement of “here’s why.”

It was especially important to Williams that NPS-75 emphasize the role of I&M in decision support. The final version made clear that although the program’s scope was servicewide, its results were intended to be of direct use to park managers, with results delivered “in a format consistent with managerial decisionmaking needs.” I&M would have a unified national mission but a place-based orientation, a design intended to help it avoid the failings of previous NPS science programs: being too parochial when controlled by superintendents, and of little practical use when controlled by a central office.²⁵ In contrast to both past models, I&M would not strive to “answer each individual resource question,” but rather to provide a fundamental, servicewide knowledge base for problem-solving, analyzing the causes of change, and supporting more targeted research. Almost 60 years after the publication of Fauna No. 1, the NPS finally had its own formalized, servicewide program of agency staff whose job was to conduct scientific “investigation, to be followed by appropriate administrative action.”²⁶

But then it almost didn’t.

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

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¹Williams, “Inventory and Monitoring Program Initiated;” Williams, Interview by Gary Williams, November 20, 2019; National Park Service, “NPS Inventory and Monitoring Program Annual Administrative Report: Fiscal Year 1993,” 1994, 9.

²Channel Islands National Park, “Annual Administrative Reports for Prototype Parks,” November 20, 1992; Williams, “Inventory and Monitoring Program Initiated.”; National Park Service, “NPS Inventory and Monitoring Program Annual Administrative Report: Fiscal Year 1993,” 21.

³Shenandoah National Park, “Shenandoah National Park Inventory & Monitoring Program Summary & Lessons Learned - 2019,” 2019.

⁴Shenandoah National Park, “Natural Resource Inventory and Long-Term Ecological Monitoring System Plan for Shenandoah National Park;” National Park Service, “NPS Inventory and Monitoring Program Annual Administrative Report: Fiscal Year 1993,” 21.

⁵Williams, “Inventory and Monitoring Program Initiated,” 10.

⁶US MAB Secretariat, “The United States Man and the Biosphere Program” (Washington, DC: US Department of State, October 1996), https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pur1.32754066784392&view=1up&seq=4.

⁷“Man and the Biosphere Program,” National Park Service History eLibrary, August 15, 2018, http://npshistory.com/publications/mab/index.htm. In 2017–2019, the United States withdrew 19 (i.e., 40%) of its 47 designated sites from the World Network of Biosphere Reserves. https://en.unesco.org/biosphere/eu-na.

⁸United States Committee for Man and the Biosphere, “Long-Term Ecological Monitoring in Biosphere Reserves” (United States National Commission for UNESCO, July 1979), http://npshistory.com/publications/mab/OPN_BR_03.pdf. Participating in the workshop were three men who would later help author the Evison Report: Boyd Evison (then superintendent at Great Smoky Mountains), forest ecologist Jerry Franklin, and Air & Water Resources Division Chief Raymond Herrmann.

⁹Great Smoky Mountains National Park, “Annual Administrative Report: Inventory and Monitoring Program, Great Smoky Mountains National Park,” November 1992.

¹⁰National Park Service, “Inventory and Monitoring Proposal, Alaska Region, National Park Service (Draft),” January 22, 1990, 20.

¹¹Susan L. Boudreau, “Long-Term Ecological Monitoring Program Synthesis and Evolution of the Prototype for Monitoring Subarctic Parks: 1991 to 2002 Perspective” (Denali National Park and Preserve, 2004), 7-8; National Park Service, “NPS Inventory and Monitoring Program Annual Administrative Report: Fiscal Year 1993,” 21.

¹²Hester to Directorate and Field Directorate, “Update on FY90 Servicewide Inventory and Monitoring (I&M) Program,” November 1990.

¹³Williams, Interview by Gary Williams, November 20, 2019.

¹⁴National Research Council, Science and the National Parks (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 1992), 52, https://doi.org/10.17226/2028. This document was popularly known as the “Gordon Report,” for chair John C. Gordon.

¹⁵Williams, “I&M Information Bulletin.”

¹⁶Gary Williams, “The National Park Service Inventory and Monitoring Program: Phase I Overview and Strategy (Draft),” 1992, http://npshistory.com/natural_resources.htm.

¹⁷Williams, "Phase I Overview," 16.

¹⁸Williams, "Phase I Overview," 14.

¹⁹Williams, “I&M Information Bulletin,” 4. By the end of 1992, the original 16 biogeographic associations had been distilled into nine: (1) Arctic/Sub-Arctic, (2) Atlantic/Gulf Coast, (3) Cave, (4) Arid Lands, (5) Deciduous Forest, (6) Lakes and Rivers, (7) Pacific Coast, (8) Tropical/Sub-Tropical, and (9) Coniferous Forest.

²⁰Williams, “I&M Information Bulletin,”4.

²¹F. Eugene Hester, “NPS-75, Natural Resources Inventory and Monitoring Guideline,” Memorandum, July 20, 1992.

²²National Park Service, “NPS-75: Natural Resources Inventory and Monitoring” (National Park Service, July 1992), 5–6.

²³Raymond Herrmann et al., “Draft Standards and Guidelines for Natural Resources Inventorying and Monitoring” (National Park Service, December 1987); National Park Service, “Standards and Guidelines for Natural Resources Inventorying and Monitoring,” April 1988, http://npshistory.com/publications/interdisciplinary/im/nps-75-1.pdf.

²⁴United States Committee for Man and the Biosphere, “Long-Term Ecological Monitoring in Biosphere Reserves” (United States National Commission for UNESCO, July 1979), http://npshistory.com/publications/mab/OPN_BR_03.pdf.

²⁵Nichols, “Science in the Parks”; Kitchell and Nichols, “Scientists, Superintendents Differ on Researchers’ Role in RM Region”; Jean Matthews, “Briggle Challenges PNR Scientists To ‘Bridge the Management Gap,’” Park Science: A Resource Management Bulletin 7, no. 2 (Winter 1987).

²⁶Wright, Dixon, and Thompson, Fauna No. 1.

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