Natural Resource Condition Assessments Published for Golden Gate and Point Reyes

December 2019 - National parks protect many of our nation’s most magnificent natural treasures, from individual species of frogs and fish to entire epic landscapes and ancient forests. Knowing how they are all doing helps park managers make strategic decisions about the best ways to protect those treasures for future generations. However, even with a number of robust programs in place to monitor the health of key natural resources, knowledge and reporting gaps remain. The National Park Service’s Natural Resource Condition Assessment (NRCA) Program aims to fill some of those gaps by sponsoring and overseeing the preparation of NRCA reports for each park with significant natural resources. In November, the program published NRCA reports for Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Point Reyes National Seashore.

The Golden Gate and Point Reyes reports, both prepared by faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in coordination with park staff, focus on a set of natural resources. The authors evaluated amphibians, breeding landbirds, steelhead trout, forests, invasive plants, and rare plants at both parks. Additionally, each park had their own unique knowledge gaps they wanted to fill. Thus for Golden Gate, the authors evaluated shorebirds and surrounding land use. For Point Reyes they evaluated coastal dunes and grasslands. To facilitate decision-making, they communicate the condition of those resources overall, as well as per site and/or per specific resource indicator, with a standardized set of symbols. The symbols represent the status of the resources, any trends in their condition, and confidence in those assessments warranted by the underlying data. The reports also provide in-depth background information, data sets, etc. for each resource.

Overall, they found that invasive plants were the only resource to warrant “significant concern” in both parks due to the large number of species involved, the large areas invaded, and the pace of new invasive species introductions. They found forests in both parks and land use around Golden Gate’s parcels to be worthy of “moderate concern” and to exhibit stable and unknown trends in their conditions, respectively. The conditions of steelhead, shorebirds, and grasslands currently warrant "moderate concern" as well, but are deteriorating over time. Amphibians, breeding landbirds, and rare plants are all in “good condition” overall, with stable (amphibians and landbirds) or unknown (rare plants) trends. Not enough information was available for the authors to assess the condition of Point Reyes’ coastal dunes.

Find more details and explanations in the full Golden Gate NRCA report and/or the full Point Reyes NRCA report. NRCA reports were also published in recent years for John Muir National Historic Site and Pinnacles National Park.

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