South Florida/Caribbean Inventory Program

The South Florida/Caribbean Network includes six parks: Big Cypress National Preserve, Biscayne National Park, Buck Island Reef National Monument , Dry Tortugas National Park , Everglades National Park , and Virgin Islands National Park . Although these six parks are distributed over a distance of more than 1,200 miles, they share a tropical environment, with certain special characteristics making each Park unique. The National Park Service has grouped these six parks together to implement the natural resource Inventory and Monitoring Program. The Vertebrate and Vascular Plant Inventory is a major step towards gaining solid scientific baseline data for use with the long term monitoring program.

The Vertebrate and Vascular Plant Inventory Study Plan addresses the network's needs for attaining the 90% goal. This includes the methods used to inventory the data gaps, the proposed staffing and budget, and a timeline. The network has been working with a budget of $1,398,000 for a five year period to accomplish the required inventories, contribute data to servicewide NPS data initiatives, and begin planning for long term monitoring.

Levels less then the 90% required are in red.

Table 1 provided the information the network used to prioritize which taxa needed to be inventoried during this initiative. Although the plants are all above the 90% level, there were questions about the taxonomy of the species found during the initial literature searches. Also BICY, BISC, and BUIS have areas in the park that have either been poorly or never inventoried, and may hold new species not currently on their lists. BISC was heavily impacted by hurricane Andrew in 1992 and BICY and BUIS had expanded boundaries providing new areas of exploration. Both fish (fresh and marine) and reptiles were below the required 90% level in the majority of the network parks, and became an identified need, as well.

The network held a scoping meeting in Key Largo, Florida from September 26 through September 29, 2000 to review NPSpecies. In attendance were both NPS personnel and invited taxonomic experts. The scoping meeting's goal was to determine if the network's first objective had been met (document occurrence of at least 90% of vertebrate and vascular plant species in each park). If this objective had not been achieved for any of the taxa, the group was to determine research priorities to attain this goal. Additionally, research priorities were developed to describe distribution and relative abundance for taxa.

Meeting participants reviewed each record within NPSpecies and corrections were made as needed. During this review, species were categorized "Probably Present" if the park is within species range and contains appropriate habitat. In other words, documented occurrences of the species in the adjoining region of the park give reason to suspect that it probably occurs within the park . Those in attendance at the scoping meeting decided which taxa within a park had met the 90% goal, and with some categories, some areas which have never been inventoried may or may not have new species, therefore the table may show that the park may currently exceed the 90% level, but with further investigation, experts expect to possibly encounter additional species. Some of these species lists were built on sampling limited locations of a park (i.e. mammals). Therefore, differences occur between expert opinion and database derived estimates.