Data Management and Analysis

Information is the common currency among the many different activities and people involved in the stewardship of a park's natural resources. The projects and people involved with activities such as park planning, inventories, short- and long-term monitoring, research studies, restoration activities, control of invasive species, T&E species management, fire management, trail and road maintenance, law enforcement, and interpretation all require and/or provide natural resource information to others. As part of the Service's effort to "improve park management through greater reliance on scientific knowledge", a primary purpose of the Inventory and Monitoring Program is to develop, organize, and make available natural resource data and to contribute to the Service's institutional knowledge by facilitating the transformation of data into information through analysis, synthesis, and modeling. The I&M Program's efforts to identify, catalog, organize, structure, archive, and make available relevant natural resource information will largely determine the Program's efficacy and image among critics, peers and advocates.

The long-term programmatic goals of the I&M Program are as follows:

1. Establish natural resource inventory and monitoring as a standard practice throughout the National Park system that transcends traditional program, activity, and funding boundaries.
2. Inventory the natural resources and park ecosystems under National Park Service stewardship to determine their nature and status.
3. Monitor park ecosystems to better understand their dynamic nature and condition and to provide reference points for comparisons with other, altered environments.
4. Integrate natural resource inventory and monitoring information into National Park Service planning, management, and decision making.
5. Share National Park Service accomplishments and information with other natural resource organizations and form partnerships for attaining common goals and objectives.

The last two of these goals can only be achieved through the development of a modern information management infrastructure (e.g., staffing, hardware, software) and procedures to ensure that relevant natural resource data collected by NPS staff, cooperators, researchers and others are entered, quality-checked, analyzed, reported, archived, documented, cataloged, and made available to others for management decision-making, research, and education.

The National Park Service is a highly decentralized agency with complex data requirements. The primary audience for many of the products from the I&M program is at the park level - provide park managers with the information they need to make better-informed decisions and to work more effectively with other agencies and individuals for the benefit of park resources. However, certain data are also needed at the regional or national level for a variety of purposes, and as stated by the National Park Advisory Board (2001), the findings "must be communicated to the public, for it is the broader public that will decide the fate of these resources".

I&M Data Management Framework

The I&M Program Data Management framework (Figure 1 below) was designed to promote integration and collaboration among parks, programs and agencies and to provide standardized, master databases for those common datasets needed at multiple levels (e.g., park, network, region, national). At the same time, the framework provides parks and networks with the flexibility to develop data structures and procedures that increase the availability and utility of data at the local level and allow them to take advantage of local partnership opportunities. The framework includes a series of internet-based, master databases to promote integration and enable linkages and data sharing to other external databases (e.g., NPS permitting system, Integrated Taxonomic Information System, USFWS T&E species database, NatureServe, eNature). A second component of the data management framework is a series of desktop applications in MS Access (the NPS standard for desktop relational databases) that can accommodate the same data as the master web-based databases. The desktop versions increase the availability and utility of each park's data by allowing users (with the appropriate permissions) to download the latest data from the corresponding master web database and develop customized displays or analysis of the data or integrate them with other local datasets. A third component of the framework is a collection of relational databases that follow the database template scheme, with an integrated link to GIS and associated tools through an Arc-Access Link Tool or geodatabase model. The Natural Resource Database Template is a flexible, relational database model in MSAccess for storing inventory and monitoring data (including raw data collected during field studies). The template has a core data structure that can be modified and built upon by different parks and networks depending on the components of their inventory and monitoring program and the specific sampling protocols they use. Modules that will include a written sampling protocol, database table structure, data entry forms and quality checking routines, and queries and reports will be coordinated by the Servicewide I&M Program and made available through a web-based monitoring protocol clearinghouse. Each module will be based on a standard sampling protocol.



Most of the information management work by the parks will be done through the 32 monitoring networks that were established to facilitate collaboration, information sharing, and economies of scale in natural resource monitoring, or by data managers with the prototype monitoring programs. The monitoring networks are designing a system for scientific data collection, analysis, and reporting that is unprecedented in the history of the National Park Service.

Information Management Tools

A priority of the inventory and monitoring effort is to make information more useable for management, research, and education and integrating natural resource information with park operations such as interpretation and maintenance. The following information management tools are being developed to assist parks and networks in making information more readily available to managers, scientists and the public:

The GIS Theme Manager is a GIS application in Arcview that makes natural resource information more available and useful to managers, interpreters, resource specialists, maintenance personnel, and others. The Theme Manager can be used as a standalone application, or can be launched from within Synthesis. It can also be used in conjunction with the NR database template as a means of organizing and displaying integrated natural resource information. The Theme Manager has the full functionality and spatial data analysis capabilities of ArcView for those who routinely use GIS, but can also be used by someone with only a few hours of training to display integrated natural resource information for planning, park operations, and decision- making. The Arcview extension and documentation for this tool can be downloaded from the GIS Theme Manager Website.

The Natural Resource Database Template is a flexible, relational database in MS Access for storing inventory and vital signs monitoring data (including raw data collected during field studies). This relational Access database can be used as a standalone database or in conjunction with the GIS Theme Manager to enter, store, retrieve, and otherwise manage natural resource information. The template has a core database structure that can be modified and built upon by different parks and networks depending on the components of their inventory and monitoring program and the specific sampling protocols they use. Additional information can be obtained from the Database Template Website.

NPSpecies is the National Park Service's master database for documenting the occurrence and status of species in more than 270 national park units that contain significant natural resources. The database includes standardized information associated with the occurrence of species in parks, including scientific names and their synonyms, common names, abundance, residency, nativity, T&E status, and reasons why a species may be of particular management interest to a park (e.g., invasive, weedy, overabundant, globally or regionally rare, state-listed species). Within NPSpecies, each species record is supported by evidence in the form of voucher specimens, references (scientific reports or datasets), and/or observation records that document the occurrence of the species in the park. Records are managed in a standard data structure and are periodically verified (certified) by subject-matter experts with the goal of providing high quality, scientifically-credible, and continually improved data to users. Historical and currently-accepted scientific names from multiple taxonomic classification systems are cross-referenced using taxonomic standards (e.g., the Integrated Taxonomic Information System and the USDA PLANTS database) to allow for data integration and sharing across parks and with other agencies and organizations. In addition, parks are able to produce species lists based on the taxonomic authorities that are most accepted in their region and by their partner agencies.

The Dataset Catalog is a tool for keeping an inventory and providing abbreviated metadata or "Metadata light" about a variety of natural resource data sets, from physical files and photographs to digital scientific and spatial data. The one-page input and report forms provide a straightforward way to document all types of resource data that may or may not have met formal metadata standards. As with other NRPC applications, the master version of the Dataset Catalog will be available through a website and will be linked to NPSpecies (the NPSpecies database) and the NatureBib bibliography, and it will also be possible to download a version in MS Access from the website.

NatureBib is the master database for natural resource bibliographic references that merges a number of previously separate databases such as NRBib, GeoBib, and others. As with NPSpecies, it will be possible to download data from the master web-based version into an MS Access version that can be used locally on computers without an internet connection. The data structure of NatureBib makes it possible to import/export records with ProCite software. The web-based version of NatureBib is linked to other databases such as NPSpecies and the NPS Online Permitting system.