AN ASSESSMENT OF BIOTIC INVENTORIES IN WESTERN UNITED-STATES NATIONAL-PARKS

We evaluated existing natural resources data from 40 national parks and monuments in the U.S. National Park Service's Western Region, which includes Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada, and several Pacific Trust Territories. Better information on species occurrence was available for vascular plants, mammals, and birds than for other taxa (reptiles, amphibians, fish, terrestrial invertebrates, aquatic invertebrates, and nonvascular plants). Although most parks had compiled species lists for at least some taxa, the majority (> 73\%) of the lists were reported to be less than 80\% complete in their species, geographic, and ecologic (community type) coverage. None of the species lists resulted from parkwide systematic surveys. About half the parks reported essentially no research on invertebrates or nonvascular plants - major components of biological diversity. The actual status of natural resources information is difficult to assess because of (1) a lack of cataloged and readily accessible information on past studies of resources, (2) essentially no standardization in recording procedures, (3) missing or poorly maintained voucher specimens, and (4) disproportionate attention to ``popular'' taxa. Large parks tended to have more information about their natural resources than smaller parks that historically have received less funding for research and resource management activities. If parks are to serve as baselines against which to measure environmental change, there is an urgent need to rank inventory and monitoring needs, standardize recording techniques, test model inventory and monitoring systems, substantially improve the natural resource awareness of all National Park Service staff, and develop a hierarchical framework of methods to collect and synthesize biological resource data over large spatial and long temporal scales. We present suggestions for strengthening biological inventory programs in the US. National Park System.