WHY MONITOR WILDERNESS CHARACTER?
The Wilderness Act of 1964, all subsequent wilderness legislation, and the wilderness policies of all the agencies that manage wilderness explicitly require the administering agencies to preserve wilderness character on the over 106 million acres of federally designated wilderness. Despite these long-standing legal and policy mandates, the agencies have not developed the means for assessing management outcomes and showing accountability in fulfilling these mandates to preserve wilderness character. This lack of wilderness-specific monitoring occurs despite:
- The steady erosion of wilderness character perceived by many wilderness field and program managers, as well as the improvement of wilderness character in some areas;
- Increasing threats to wilderness character from visitor use (Cole 2002) and other widespread threats (Peine and others 1988, Cole and Landres 1996, Landres and others 1998, Hendee and Dawson 2001); and
- Repeated calls for monitoring to improve wilderness stewardship (Government Accounting Office 1989, USDA Forest Service 2000, Pinchot Institute for Conservation 2001).
The purpose of monitoring wilderness character is to improve wilderness stewardship by providing managers a tool to evaluate how wilderness character is changing over time and how stewardship actions affect this change in wilderness character. Specifically, wilderness character monitoring is needed to:
- Assess management accomplishment in fulfilling legal and policy mandates to preserve wilderness character;
- Improve wilderness stewardship by understanding how individual decisions contribute to preserving or degrading wilderness character;
- Provide managers a tool that synthesizes many different pieces of information into a single integrated assessment of trends in wilderness character;
- Establish legacy information to assess trends in wilderness character beyond the span of individual careers;
- Articulate a positive vision and improve communication among managers, decision- and policy-makers, and the public about wilderness character;
- Provide outcome-based trend data for Government Performance and Results Act reporting.
Because management decisions and actions in wilderness may have a lasting effect on the land and on the meanings associated with wilderness, the accumulation of seemingly small and individual decisions may result in significant loss of wilderness character over time. Only long term monitoring, beyond individual careers, will show these cumulative effects on what is unique to wilderness-its wilderness character.
For more information on the background and description of wilderness character, please
see the following:
References Cited in This Section
Wilderness Character Monitoring:
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