A natural resource condition assessment for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks: Appendix 1 - landscape context

Thorne, James; Monahan, William; Holguin, Andrew; Schwartz, Mark

We assessed landscape elements of the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (SEKI) from the context of the ecological region that comprises the southern Sierra Nevada. The goals of this chapter are to identify the relative contributions, or unique values, of natural resources that the Parks provide within the region; and, to evaluate landscape level threats to the Parks. To these ends, this chapter predominantly presents data that can be summarized across the whole region, and asks two questions. 1) ―For each landscape element, what is the relative contribution that the Parks make to the overall region? 2) ―For focal landscape elements (e.g., fragmentation, human encroachment) what are the landscape level threats to the Parks? The chapter provides Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks with: (i) a series of context-setting maps and tables that address natural ecosystem elements, historic trends in climate and human affects; and (ii) an analysis of existing landscape dynamics data for areas within and surrounding the park. The chapter is also meant to be a reference for these data elements, and as such presents a large number of tables and figures, with the hope that these can provide a roadmap for later users to track down data for their own purposes. In defining a landscape area for this chapter, we used the Protected Area Centered Ecosystem (PACE) boundary developed specifically for Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Yosemite National Parks as part of the Park Analysis for Monitoring Support (PALMS) project detailed below. The PACE boundary contains an ecologically meaningful area for landscape analysis that integrates a number of fundamentally important factors for the parks, including watershed boundaries, natural disturbances, and crucial and contiguous habitat for select species. Detailed methods associated with establishing PACE boundaries for this NRCA are described under the project overview for PALMS. The critical landscape questions addressed here have to do with the extent to which SEKI NP is unique in the region, and how much SEKI contributes to regional natural attributes. We describe the natural resource condition of SEKI, at the landscape scale, according to three criteria: (a) the physical environment; (b) human land use factors; and (c) measures of potential conservation interest. The physical environment includes the following factors: elevation; geology; minimum and maximum annual temperatures; precipitation; runoff; climatic water deficit (a measure of the degree of drought stress experienced by plants), vegetation type and cover; standing carbon; yearly variations in carbon produced; and water yield. Measures of human land use include: land ownership; change in human populations around the parks; and change in housing density. Additional measures of conservation interest include social, biotic, and physical/biotic interactions, specifically: the network of protected areas; connectivity between those protected areas and other habitat patches; the extent of fragmentation by human development; and the Fire Return Interval Departure (FRID) index (a measure of the departure of vegetation from its natural fire cycle). Critical questions are addressed in two ways. We describe the condition, and in some instances trend, for attributes inside the SEKI NP boundary and we describe how those conditions relate to the same measures outside the park, in the larger PACE boundary. This chapter is meant to provide a broader spatial context from which content from other focal element chapters may be interpreted at a larger spatial scale. The detailed information provided in other chapters was frequently not available across the entire region, however patterns of those focal elements (e.g., biodiversity, air quality) may possibly be better interpreted when the ecoregional extent of factors that influence those elements is described.

A natural resource condition assessment for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks: Appendix 1 - landscape context

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