Keeping It Wild in the National Park Service: A User Guide to Integrating Wilderness Character Into Park Planning, Management, and Monitoring

Wilderness Stewardship Division

This User Guide was developed to help National Park Service (NPS) staff effectively and efficiently fulfill the mandate from the 1964 Wilderness Act and NPS policy to “preserve wilderness character” now and into the future. This mandate applies to all congressionally designated wilderness and other park lands that are, by policy, managed as wilderness, including eligible, potential, proposed, or recommended wilderness. This User Guide builds on the ideas in Keeping It Wild: An Interagency Strategy to Monitor Trends in Wilderness Character Across the National Wilderness Preservation System (Landres and others 2008). The User Guide offers practical guidance and tools to integrate wilderness character into park planning, management, and monitoring, and is divided into six chapters and a companion document: • Chapter 1, Introduction to the User Guide and Wilderness Character—Describes the context for why wilderness and wilderness character are important and the special role of the National Park Service in its preservation; defines the concept of wilderness character and the general benefits of its integration into planning, management, and monitoring. • Chapter 2, Building Blocks for Integrating Wilderness Character—Describes the fundamental information needed to effectively integrate wilderness character into park planning, management, and monitoring. • Chapter 3, Integrating Wilderness Character into Planning—Describes how to address wilderness character in a park foundation document and selected park planning products, which can serve as examples for other types of planning efforts. • Chapter 4, Integrating Wilderness Character into Management and Operations— Describes how wilderness character relates to NPS Director’s Order 41: Wilderness Stewardship, staff training, minimum requirements analysis, scientific activities, environmental compliance, emergency services, and natural and cultural resources. • Chapter 5, Monitoring Change in Wilderness Character—Describes how to identify and prioritize measures to assess current conditions and track change in wilderness character over time in a park in a way that is nationally consistent and locally relevant. • Chapter 6, Emerging Tools to Integrate Wilderness Character—Describes several new tools that are still being developed, including: wilderness character mapping, the wilderness character monitoring database, and evaluating the “extent necessary” for commercial services. Other tools will be added as they are developed. • Wilderness Stewardship Plan Handbook 2014—Describes the development and components of a wilderness stewardship plan driven by the concept of wilderness character. The Handbook is a standalone document not included within the User Guide, but directly associated with it. The User Guide is not prescriptive but instead offers a wide range of guidance and tools for incorporating wilderness character into park planning, management, and monitoring. Each chapter may be used in any order that makes the most sense. On page xii, the table “Where Can I Find What I Need?” enables quick reference to topics of interest. In addition, worksheets and examples are included in the User Guide and are also on the NPS Wilderness Character tab under the Wilderness Stewardship Program Sharepoint site at http://share.inside.nps.gov/sites/WASO/WSD/WC.