Integrated upland vegetation and soils monitoring for Chaco Culture National Historical Park: 2012 and 2014 summary report
DeCoster JK and Swan MC. 2016. Integrated upland vegetation and soils monitoring for Chaco Culture National Historical Park: 2012 and 2014 summary report. Natural Resource Data Series. NPS/SCPN/NRDS—2016/1038. National Park Service. Fort Collins, Colorado
The National Park Service Inventory and Monitoring (I&M) Program was designed to determine the status and monitor the conditions of park natural resources, providing park managers with a scientific foundation for making decisions and working with other agencies and the public to protect park ecosystems.The Southern Colorado Plateau Network (SCPN) is monitoring vegetation and soils as overall indicators of upland ecosystem integrity (Thomas et al. 2006). SCPN and park staff selected the Sandy Loam ecological site for long-term monitoring of upland vegetation and soils at Chaco Canyon National Historical Park (CHCU). An ecological site is a landscape division with characteristic soils, hydrology, plant communities, and disturbance regimes and responses. Its classification is based on soil survey data (Butler et al. 2003). The Sandy Loam ecological site comprises a large area of the upland grassland ecosystem at CHCU. It faces numerous threats, including soil erosion, climate change, and invasion by nonnative species. In this report, we document monitoring activities in the CHCU Sandy Loam ecological site during the 2012 and 2014 field seasons, and report these data in the context of the data that we collected in the year that the plots were established, which occurred during different years from 2007 to 2011. For the complete set of data collected at CHCU during these years, see the data summary reports, available from the SCPN website (http://science. nature.nps.gov/im/units/scpn/publications.cfm?tab=2). Between 2007 and 2011 we established and sampled 30 plots in the Sandy Loam ecological site. In 2012 we implemented a panel design incorporating these plots into it, and resampled two different subsets of 20 plots in 2012 and 2014.
- Type
- Published Report
- Authors
- DeCoster, Jim; Swan, Megan
- Date of Issue
- 2016-08
- Publisher
- National Park Service
- Units
- CHCU , NRSS , SCPN
- Keywords
- long-term monitoring, Sandy Loam ecological site, soils monitoring, Upland vegetation