WHAT IS THE SCOPE OF WILDERNESS CHARACTER MONITORING?
Wilderness character monitoring was developed by the USDA Forest Service to assess long term trends of wilderness character in all 407 Forest Service wildernesses. This monitoring protocol is not agency policy; it is a tool to help managers assess the outcomes of their management and the effectiveness of agency policy on preserving wilderness character.
This national monitoring protocol was built in two phases. The first phase developed the conceptual foundation for this monitoring in the publication "Monitoring Selected Conditions Related to Wilderness Character: A National Framework." Developing this conceptual foundation was necessary because, unlike other resources such as air, water, and wildlife, the concept of wilderness character is poorly understood, cuts across many resource areas, and has never been formally described let alone monitored. The second phase developed the "Technical Guide for Monitoring Selected Conditions Related to Wilderness Character," (available Dec. 2006) which presents the rationale for selecting specific indicators and measures, and the protocols for data collection, storage, analysis, reporting, and use of the results.
Wilderness character monitoring is a relatively complex endeavor, and it's important to understand both what this protocol does and what it doesn't do.
Wilderness character monitoring:
- Assesses national trends in wilderness character derived from compilations of nationally consistent information from individual wildernesses.
- Focuses on four specific qualities of wilderness derived from the Section 2(c) Definition of Wilderness from the 1964 Wilderness Act that are linked to wilderness character-untrammeled, natural, undeveloped, and outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation.
- Monitors a select set of wilderness attributes and stewardship actions that indicate how these four qualities of wilderness are changing over time within a wilderness, and does not monitor the local or intangible aspects of wilderness character, visitor experiences, or project-specific and site-specific resources of concern.
- Assesses whether these four qualities and wilderness character are "stable," "improving," or "degrading" over time at the scale of an entire wilderness. This assessment is based on how selected measures of wilderness character change over time. Decision rules are then used to combine these trends to derive a trend in the indicator. Trends among indicators are combined to assess trends in the monitoring questions, and so on to finally derive a trend in wilderness character.
- Assesses change in wilderness character within an individual wilderness and not in relation to a national benchmark or another wilderness. Every wilderness is unique in the combination of legislative direction, planning context, ecological conditions, and social context. This monitoring does not compare wilderness character from one wilderness to another or develop a numerical index of wilderness character that could be used for such purposes.
- Uses indicators and measures that are relevant, reliable, and cost-efficient. Cost-efficiency requires the use of data already existing within Forest Service or other national databases at the time this monitoring is implemented. Because of practical restrictions on funding and staffing, this monitoring does not require any new field data to be collected.
For more information on this monitoring protocol, please see the following:
References Cited in This Section
Wilderness Character Monitoring:
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