Inventory & Monitoring

Long-term Monitoring in the Mediterranean Coast Network

Prior to the Natural Resource Challenge (1999), long-term monitoring programs at Cabrillo National Monument and Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area were small and subject to the availability of staff, funds and partnership opportunities. The most significant effort to date was at Channel Islands National Park. Identified by the National Park Service in the early 1980s as one of several Prototype Monitoring Parks across the National Park system, Channel Islands National Park developed a monitoring program based on the concept of “vital signs” monitoring.

The establishment of the Natural Resource Challenge revitalized and expanded the natural resource program within the park service and improved park management through greater reliance on scientific knowledge. The addition of funds through the Challenge provided the opportunity for more extensive monitoring efforts to expand servicewide, building from the existing and far more intensive efforts already established in selected prototype monitoring parks.  It accelerated biotic inventories and paved the way for a new approach to ecosystem monitoring based on the concept of ecosystem vital signs to guide the development of long-term monitoring efforts.

Under the Challenge, the Mediterranean Coast Network received funding to begin a comprehensive effort to identify, prioritize, select, develop protocols for and monitor vital signs of ecosystem condition based on the new approach.  The level of funding received was not intended to cover comprehensive monitoring in the network, but instead to augment existing inventory and monitoring efforts already underway and to provide a minimum infrastructure upon which the Mediterranean Coast Network can build upon in the future.  The funding was network-based to facilitate collaboration, information sharing, and economies of scale in natural resource monitoring.  Since Channel Islands National Park had already gone through an analogous process to identify vital signs specific to that park, the network efforts were focused upon identifying indicators of processes or elements that were not addressed through their monitoring program.

Beginning in 2000, the Mediterranean Coast Network began designing a program to identify and monitor, on a long-term basis, network vital signs not already addressed through the existing monitoring program at Channel Islands National Park and the related park-based monitoring at Cabrillo National Monument and Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.  A series of discussions and workshops between park resource managers and academic subject matter experts from the National Park Service, state and federal agencies with stewardship over natural resources, and other interested stakeholders, and a review of park general and resource management plans, published literature, and current management activities that could help determine the course of monitoring at network parks, resulted in the identification of monitoring goals and objectives for significant ecosystems drivers and stressors, the development of a general conceptual model, and the selection of vital signs for the southern California Mediterranean-type ecosystem.

The Vital Signs Monitoring Plan describes the process, identifies the monitoring indicators or “vital signs” of the network and the strategy for long-term monitoring to detect trends in resource condition.  The Monitoring Plan was finalized September 30, 2005 and is available online.