Integration of science and park management: a framework for partnership

National Park Service; Bennetts, Robert; Chambers, Nina; Comiskey, James; James, Kevin; Lawler, James; Legg, Kristin; Matthews, Elizabeth; Mazzu, Linda; Ohms, Rene; Schreier, Cheryl; Taylor, Jason

The Inventory and Monitoring Division (IMD) of the National Park Service (NPS) is over ten years old and is ready to improve its science delivery and resource management support. To facilitate this, an internal survey was conducted of the program’s staff to assess perspectives about where we were working effectively and where changes might be warranted. Respondents identified a number of areas needing attention, including the recognition that having a strong connection and relevance to parks is pivotal to the success of IMD. The Integrating Science and Management workgroup was tasked with considering how science is effectively integrated into parks and to make recommendations to improve science delivery and use in science-based management decisions. This report is the fulfillment of that task. The workgroup identified four key components to achieve effective integration, each of which were considered as a module of an overall framework to integrate scientific information into park decision making. This framework is intended to be iterative, flexible, and dynamic. Not all ideas will be useful in all situations; nor will implementation of the framework be a linear process. Rather, the framework represents a suite of principles that we believe are worth considering for better integration of science and park management. The first module focuses on building a foundation. It is based on a core principle that a strong partnership between scientists and decision makers is essential to achieve a shared vision of the NPS Mission and to successfully integrating science into park management. In this module, we emphasize that maintaining and strengthening an effective partnership requires a mutual commitment and on-going two-way communication to understand the perspectives, needs, and contributions of both the science providers and the science users. In the second module, we focus on evaluating the science. Assessing science needs is an important place to start identifying information gaps and how best to fill those gaps. In this section, we discuss opportunities to evaluate existing IMD science and enhance its application to management decisions. We recognize that the core responsibility of the IMD is to collect, manage, analyze, and report on long-term data for selected vital signs and to effectively deliver data and information on resource condition to park decision makers. We suggest that networks and parks have varying capacities to go beyond these core responsibilities and, depending on the circumstances, parks and networks should work collaboratively as partners to decide if, when, and to what extent additional science support is appropriate to meet management needs. In the third module, we focus on communicating results. Communication is key to any partnership. This module provides best practices to communicate more effectively, both enhancing the understanding of science findings and making them relevant to decision makers. We emphasize targeted communication both in terms of the intended audience as well as the topical focus that is most relevant to park management needs. We further emphasize that communication is a two-way process and suggest listening sessions as a tool for balancing the flow of communication. In the fourth module, we discuss resource management decisions. This is where the foundation built in the previous modules is put into action. We introduce a general range of decisions (less to more complex) and describe basic principles of good decision making. We introduce the concept of a structured decision-making process that formalizes the incorporation of scientific data for more complex decisions and discuss the context for when such a structured approach is warranted.

Integration of science and park management: a framework for partnership

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