of Our Growing Understanding
About Denali Ecosystems About Monitoring
July 19, 1999
By
Karen L. Oakley
USGS Alaska Biological Science Center
With valuable input from Lynne Caughlan, Sarah Conn, Ed Debevec, Dot Helm, and Carl
Roland.
This document presents a synthesis of ongoing work managed by the USGS Alaska Biological Science Center related to the development of a Long-term Ecological Monitoring Program at Denali National Park and Preserve, Alaska.
The purpose of this synthesis is to take stock of our activities in the past year or so and pull together the varied pieces, hopefully to a coherent whole. I intend this synthesis to provide an easy way for all the players in the Denali LTEM program to quickly catch-up with what we are learning about the Denali ecosystem and monitoring. I hope also to generate, provoke, and otherwise incite discussion. To truly engage with the monitoring issues we face in the design of the Denali LTEM, we need to be more aware of what each other is doing. Hopefully this synthesis will help lay the foundation for some much needed discussions.
With the new LTEM Program and Data Managers coming on at the park, and with various reviews being contemplated at the national and regional levels of USGS, this synthesis seems timely. We are about to begin the final year of USGS funding for this phase of the program’s development (and perhaps the final year of USGS funding period), so catching-up sooner rather than later is important. If mid-course corrections are needed, we will still have some time in which to make them, before our funding comes to an end.
As laid out in the study plan for this research effort, my primary goal has been to keep moving, doing "useful" things, while we wait for the park to hire a new LTEM Program Manager and lead the effort to refine the objectives of the program. To guide us through this interim period, we knew that, in general, the park wanted the LTEM program to look at a larger spatial scale and to have greater relevance for management. We have tried to actively engage with those two issues. While we have had some success at grappling with the spatial scale issue, I would have to say, in all honesty, we have had limited success at addressing the management relevancy issue. The picture of what the management issues are, and how the LTEM program can help them, is still unclear.
This synthesis has two parts:
- Snapshots: For the manager who just wants the high points.
This section is in bulleted executive summary format to capture just the main take home
messages from each area of endeavor. Although this section is aimed at managers, it
provides an overview of what is going on in each of the major areas where we are working
and would thus be useful reading for all program participants.
- The Details: For anyone who wants to get the complete picture: This section provides a glimpse into the sausage-making. Each section includes links to Adobe Acrobat versions of all the relevant documents, with the narrative providing crucial information linking the documents and telling how our thinking is evolving.
Whether you choose to peruse Snapshots or The Details, they each follow the same scheme, presenting information on the primary topics on which we are working.
What We are Working On
The USGS-Alaska Biological Science Center is putting the majority of its resources for development of the Denali Long-term Ecological Monitoring program into three areas:- Vegetation
- Aquatic invertebrates and stream communities
- Small mammal population monitoring
Common themes of our work for these components are:
- evaluation of past data and an assessment of the value of
the data being collected under the original protocols for meeting park objectives, and
- rethinking objectives in light of the desire to extend the spatial scale of the program and provide stronger links to management issues.
We are also working on several topics that address general
issues of monitoring. These include:
I have also included in this synthesis, an
up-to-date list of the scientific contributions that can be traced to
USGS involvement in the development of the Denali LTEM program.