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IMPLEMENTING REGIONAL SCALE MONITORING IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST REGION OF THE U.S.
Citation:
McKenzie, D H. IMPLEMENTING REGIONAL SCALE MONITORING IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST REGION OF THE U.S. Presented at Annual Meeting of The International EnvironMetrics Society, Genoa, Italy, June 18-22, 2002.
Description:
Vast forest greeted the early non-native explorers and settlers as they traversed the Pacific Northwest, currently the states of Washington, Oregon and Northern California, west of the Cascade Mountains. This natural resource supported an ever-expanding logging industry, with substantial increases during WWII, reaching its peak during the 1970s and 1980s. During the mid- to late- 1980s, timber harvest from Federal lands (public lands administered by the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management) peaked at 5 billion board ft. Intensive silviculture on both public and private forests dramatically changed the forested landscape. In the early 1990s, the courts ruled on several lawsuits, primarily addressing the Northern Spotted Owl and its habitat, which challenged the federal land management practices, concluding that changes were required to meet environmental statues and laws. In 1994, the Northwest Forest Plan (NFP) was completed and the Secretaries for the Departments of Agriculture and Interior signed a Record of Decision that provided new standards and guidelines for management of the 24 million acres of public land. Six federal departments and agencies signed an memorandum of understanding which established an interagency and intergovernmental framework to achieve a coordinated implementation of the NFP's ecosystem management. Court challenges to the NFP resulted in the courts ruling that was a valid plan, but cautioned that to remain valid, the monitoring components of the plan had to be implemented.
Three of the NFP monitoring components are addressed in this presentation, the Northern Spotted Owl (NSO) and Aquatic Riparian Effectiveness Monitoring program (AREMP), and strategic surveys for rare and uncommon species. The NSO monitoring program is founded upon conducting detailed demographic studies on eight sites thought to be representative of the NFP area. Information from mark and recapture approaches is being used to estimate population parameters for the NSO, e.g. survival and fecundity rates, migration and immigration. The AREMP is field evaluating a probabilistic survey approach to gather information to assess small watershed condition. Information on rare and uncommon species is being gathered at a subset of sites on a systematic grid established as part of the Forest Inventory and Analysis program.
The experience of implementing regional scale monitoring programs, within an interagency framework, and the usefulness of monitoring results will be discussed.