Andrea Woodward, USGS, discusses monitoring strategies with John Morton, NWRS.

Erik Beaver, USGS, listens intently to Nancy Swanton, NPS.

* Monitoring data is useful only when converted to information. *  Understand your clients’ information objectives – they may differ from your own. * Your constituents include not only your managers but also the regional and national offices, local communities and partners. *  A dedicated constituency (at all levels) is essential to the long-run survival of a monitoring program. * Maintaining an active, supportive constituents requires timely reporting of information results. * A core, dedicated staff is critical for development and long-term program survival of an I & M program – staving off death by ‘other duties as assigned’.  The ‘core’   includes ‘in-house’ technical staff. * Successful monitoring programs cooperate with partners and link to communities. * It is always contentious to allocate monitoring costs among local, ecoregional and regional levels because they have different information needs. * A multi-scale inventory and monitoring strategy is like a tiered wedding cake, where the wide lower layer represents the variety of data collected and used at the local level and the increasingly smaller, higher layers represent the less quantitative information shared up the line. The figurine at the top may represent a report to Congress or the Public on the overall ecological health of the system. * It took 10 years for NPS’s Vital Signs to get funded and 15 years for the scientists at EPA to convince managers that information offered by EMAP/NARS was essential to their mission. * To succeed, a program needs Champions, particularly at the national level, with the skill to speak the language of budgets while espousing the program vision and benefits. 

*** Can the agency afford not to do this?

A distinguished group of national and international monitoring program managers and scientists recently shared these and other hard-won insights at a Forum on Ecoregional Monitoring in Anchorage, Alaska.  The Forum was a critical step toward restructuring the I & M program on Region 7 Refuges to address priority management questions at the ecoregional and regional scales, as well as at the refuge scale

On the first day, representatives of established monitoring programs, such as the National Park Service, Parks Canada, the EPA, US Forest Service and others, described their multi-scale monitoring programs and lessons learned designing, promoting, establishing and maintaining them.  Two days of workshops followed where R7 managers and biologists began designing a program for R7 Refuges, with input from partners, collaborators, NGOs, other programmatic Service staff and guests.  It was a demanding but ultimately rewarding event, with global climate change, a dominant but not exclusive theme.  

The Forum was a cooperative effort between Erik Beever and Andrea Woodward of the USGS Alaska and Forest & Rangeland Ecosystem Science Centers, respectively, and Danielle Jerry and Joel Reynolds of USFWS Region 7 Refuges’ Division of Realty and Natural Resources; it was funded via a Science Support Proposal. 

Erik and Andrea will now develop a draft ecoregional monitoring strategy for R7 refuges based on the workshop conclusions and recommendations.  Refuge and RO staffs, and other partners from the meeting, will review the draft proposal and, at subsequent meetings, flesh out a collaborative inventory and monitoring strategy for the Region’s Refuge program.     

Organizers and participants hope that Region 7’s bottom-up effort will converge, in a timely fashion, with the push for a National inventory and monitoring program outlined in the Service’s draft Strategic Plan for Responding to Accelerating Climate Change.