Vital Signs Monitoring

Knowing the condition of natural resources in national parks is fundamental to the National Park Service’s ability to manage park resources “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” National Park managers across the country are confronted with increasingly complex and challenging issues that require a broad-based understanding of the status and trends of park resources as a basis for making decisions, and for working with other agencies and the public for the benefit of park resources.

Natural resource monitoring offers site-specific information needed to understand and identify change in complex, variable, and imperfectly understood natural systems and to determine whether observed changes are within natural levels of variability or may be indicators of unwanted human influences. Thus, monitoring provides a basis for understanding and identifying meaningful change in natural systems. Monitoring data help to define the normal limits of natural variation in park resources and provide a basis for understanding observed changes; monitoring results can also be used to determine what constitutes impairment and to identify the need for change in management practices.

The long-term goals of the Inventory and Monitoring (I & M) Program are to monitor vital signs - physical and biological resources - to better understand the status and trends of each park's natural resources. The Southeast Coast Network I & M Program's staff have worked with a Technical Steering Committee and Board of Directors to develop a detailed monitoring plan for the parks in the region. The monitoring plan provides information essential to preserving and enhancing the region's most important natural resources. The program is being implemented in coordination with partners including neighboring universities, Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Units, local, state, and federal government agencies, and nonprofit organizations.

What are Vital Signs?

Vital signs provide information about the health of our park ecosystems. They are (1) select physical, chemical, and biological elements and processes of park ecosystems; (2) known or hypothesized effects of stressors; or (3) elements that have important human values. You can examine the vital signs that the SECN plans to monitor by clicking on the links to the left.