A Shenandoah salamander is named after this area.
It is a species that lives on mountaintops
within the park at high elevations.
The species is rare, it's listed as federally endangered.
The patches of habitat that the Shenandoah salamander lives in
are small.
You could walk through one of these patches
in just a few minutes.
It's cooler than the surrounding areas, the lower elevations.
And as the climate warms, there is no place
for these species to go.
It's at the mountaintop already.
They can't go upslope to cool off at this point.
They can't migrate.
They can't move anywhere.
They're limited to those high elevation places
within the park, and we're concerned
about the fate of the species in the face of climate change.
National parks are some of the most beautiful places
in the world, and they face some very unique problems.
We at the Inventory and Monitoring Program
have two primary duties.
The inventory part is showing up and actually cataloging
what is there.
Monitoring is returning to those sites
year after year to see if changes are
occurring with those resources.
Probably the most easy way to describe or define
rocky intertidal or intertidal zones in general--
they're the area of land between high watermark
and the low watermark.
So the way I think about it is that with these species
living in this environment, every day
they're right on the edge.
They're ecologically and behaviorally very close
to always being near survival.
And so any changes to that really can throw them off.
Climate change brings with it a whole host
of changes, everything from the temperature to sea level rise
to increased acidification.
18.23.
18.6.
When we get directly into the field to do the work,
we use a mixture of techniques.
Some of these are transect driven,
where we're on our hands and knees,
moving down through the rocky intertidal
at regular intervals, checking to see what that tape crosses
and repeating that tape year after year.
And what you're looking for is change,
whatever the metric that you happen to be measuring is.
So in some cases, that can be biodiversity.
That can be just species density.
And in some cases it can be where the species are.
The mission of the National Park Service
really is to preserve, unimpaired,
the natural resources.
And that's an easy statement to make,
but it really requires knowledge.
And so the Inventory and Monitoring Program
specializes in getting data and knowledge
to help inform the decisions that are necessary to protect
those natural resources.
Brook trout are a cold water species.
They're native trout.
They are highly valued as a sport fish.
They're the state fish of both Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
If water temperatures get above 72 degrees Fahrenheit
for any real length of time, they won't survive.
Many of our streams in Delaware Water Gap we know
are already, during the summer, close to that maximum 72
degrees, but they're still cold enough for brook trout.
But if they warm up even a few degrees,
that could spell disaster for the brook trout.
That could eliminate them from many of these streams.
Here at Shenandoah National Park,
in our freshwater streams, we're very
concerned about rising temperatures, both air
temperatures and water temperatures.
And the reason for that is these are cold water,
headwater streams that support macro invertebrates, insects
and bugs, stone flies, caddisflies.
A lot of the aquatic animals we have
and our fish need cold water.
So because we're concerned about our fisheries,
we regularly go into the streams and monitor the fish.
That means we go in and find them, ID them, measure them.
And we want to make sure we know if their numbers are increasing
or decreasing, as well if the diversity of fish is changing.
Work like this is very important for a land manager to use.
Fortunately, we haven't seen any losses in our fish,
but we have seen some losses in our macroinvertebrates.
And as we move forward with increasing temperatures,
we want to know where some of those safe havens are.
Where is the refugia here?
Where would a fish go if the temperature
started to creep up?
So we partner with the US Geological Survey,
and they're coming in and mapping out the locations
within a stream of cold water seeps and springs.
It's water coming from underground into the stream,
and it provides cooler water.
So it's actually bringing down the water temperature.
That helps us identify what areas should we be prioritizing
for future protection.
But if we don't know where those are,
because we haven't researched and inventoried,
we can't help our fisheries.
The highest elevations in the park host
these rare ecological communities,
some rare plants that are listed as globally imperiled, which
means there are only a few portions of these
left across the planet.
Those same areas host species like the Shenandoah salamander.
So a lot of our rarity is up high, at high elevations,
and is at risk.
We partner with the US Geological Survey
in monitoring the Shenandoah salamander,
because it is so rare and it's wholly within Shenandoah
National Park.
Our goal through this monitoring is to try to inform us
what could we do.
Are there things that we're missing?
So we can look at things that are
important to protect the species for the long-term survival
of the Shenandoah salamander.
I think inventory and monitoring is critical in national parks.
We don't have a lot of data to tell us the long-term trends.
And that's what national parks are about, the long view.
If we don't have data sets that go across decades,
we won't really understand up and down fluctuations
of a species, of a metric.
And that's critical to have as a manager.