Klamath Network Vegetation Community Monitoring Project

Odion, Dennis; Sarr, Daniel; Mohren, Sean; Smith, Sean

The development of the Klamath Network vital signs monitoring has emphasized the importance of documenting status and trends in the composition, structure, and function of ecosystems. Vegetation is a foundation for terrestrial ecosystem composition, structure, and function. Vegetation also ranked among the highest potential vital signs for monitoring in the Network’s vital signs selection process. The reasons are simply that vegetation dominates biomass and energy pathways and defines the habitat for most other forms of life. Changes in vegetation composition, structure, and function will therefore have a profound effect on ecosystems. Monitoring vegetation change is thus imperative to detecting and understanding status and trends in park ecosystem vital signs, the overriding goal of NPS Inventory and Monitoring. The vegetation of the Klamath parks contributes to the unique and renowned biodiversity of the region. The importance of the Klamath Region as a floristic center of diversity for western North America has been recognized in classic papers by Whittaker (1960, 1961) and Stebbins and Major (1965). This diversity is paralleled in other life forms, leading to the area being highlighted for its global biodiversity significance (DellaSala et al. 1999). The biological wealth of the region is generally attributed to the remarkable array of geologic parent materials and climates present (Wallace 1983) and the role the region played as a refugium during glacial maxima (Whittaker 1960, 1961). Disturbances such as fire have also been instrumental in producing spatial and temporal heterogeneity that promotes diversity (Taylor and Skinner 1998, Odion et al. 2004). Taylor and Skinner point out that, “Few forested regions have experienced fires as frequently and with such high variability in fire severity as those in the Klamath Mountains.” Some aspects of vegetation change will be monitored by other protocols and thus do not need to be part of the vegetation protocol. For instance, the land cover protocol should provide extensive, but spatially less detailed information about vegetation structure. It will quantify the extent of vegetation formations and their patch size, configuration, and connectivity. It will also provide information about spatial patterns of disturbance. The whitebark pine protocol will monitor disturbances by diseases and insects in high elevation forests at plots that are co-located with vegetation plots. But the specific disease and insect sampling protocols are additions to the vegetation sampling under this protocol. The cave protocol will monitor the unique vegetation (non-vascular) at cave entrances, which are numerous at Lava Beds, but which will not be targeted with the probabilistic vegetation sampling design here. The intertidal protocol will monitor algae vegetation, which is abundant and diverse along the rocky coastline of Redwood National and State Parks. Finally, the aquatic protocols for streams and lakes will monitor aquatic macrophytes and periphyton (algae mixed with bacteria and other microorganisms). Also, many vegetation monitoring plots are co-located with landbird monitoring sites, which can help to identify habitat changes associated with trends in bird populations. Thus, the vegetation monitoring protocol plays a central role in the overall vital signs monitoring strategy of the Klamath Network.

Klamath Network Vegetation Community Monitoring Project

Program

Products

Collections