A study plan to inventory vascular plants and vertebrates

Author:

Hu, Darcy

Title:

A study plan to inventory vascular plants and vertebrates

Year:

2000

Subject:

National parks and reserves Plant communities Hawaii Island

Summary:

The National Park Service's primary mission is to conserve unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the national park system for the enjoyment of this and future generations. Recognizing the need for good scientific information to manage parks, in 1998 Congress passed the National Parks Omnibus Management Act. The Act mandated a "program of inventory and monitoring of National Park System resources to establish baseline information and to provide information on the long-term trends in the condition of National Park System resources." Currently, the Service is unable to attain this mission in many parks, owing to a serious lack of scientific information about the nature and condition of resources in those parks, especially biological resources. In addition to a lack of basic information about what biological resources occur in the parks, the Service also generally lacks credible information about the current status of those resources and how they are changing over time in response to the myriad threats and issues impacting those resources. Addressing this general lack of credible information about park resources and the new congressional mandate, Congress funded a Servicewide Inventory and Monitoring (I&M) Program of the National Park Service. This national program coordinates systematic efforts to acquire 12 basic data sets for 265 parks with significant natural resources. This will include basic information on air and water quality; base cartography; weather data; geology, soil, and vegetation maps for the park; a natural resource bibliography; and information about the occurrence, distribution, and relative abundance of vertebrate and vascular plant species in the parks. The I&M Program views these inventories as an interactive process. The national program funds the initial efforts in all parks to compile and organize existing data and fill data gaps through targeted field investigations, after which further additions and refinements to these initial inventories can be made during more in-depth field investigations funded by various sources including the national program.

URL:

https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/Reference/Profile/571872

Collection:

Monographs