North Cascades National Park Service Complex: Acoustical monitoring report data year 2015
Brady S. 2017. North Cascades National Park Service Complex: Acoustical monitoring report data year 2015. Natural Resource Report. NPS/NOCA/NRR—2017/1544. National Park Service. Fort Collins, Colorado
Natural sounds are integral to ecosystem function; they are one of the resources and values that National Park Service (NPS) managers are responsible for protecting and preserving. The NPS evaluates federal actions that may impact the human and natural environment of units within the national park system. The acoustic environment, like air, water or wildlife, is a valuable resource that can be substantially degraded by inappropriate sound levels and frequencies. Intrusive sounds (noise) are of concern to NPS managers because they can impede the ability to accomplish the NPS mission of resource protection and public enjoyment. This is especially important when assessing wilderness character within individual park units, which park managers are charged to preserve and protect by the 1964 Wilderness Act. Anthropogenic noise may also disrupt ecosystem processes by interfering with predator prey relationships and the ability of wildlife to communicate, establish territory, reproduce, support and protect offspring (Siemers and Schaub 2011, Schroeder et al. 2012, McClure et al. 2013, Shannon et al. 2016). People visit national parks to see, hear and experience myriad phenomena associated with specific natural and cultural environments. Yet, in many cases, those environments are being increasingly impacted by anthropogenic noise altering their experience (Lynch et al. 2011, Buxton et al. 2017). In 2015 North Cascades National Park Complex (NOCA) began a long-term monitoring program to track trends in the acoustic environment as one metric in the park’s Wilderness Character monitoring program; this report summarizes the data collected at these sites for 2015. NOCA is located approximately 95 kilometers north and 70 kilometers east of Seattle, Washington; the northern boundary of the complex shares a border with Canada. NOCA is 2,752 km2 (680,000 acres) in size and 94% designated wilderness. Data was collected at Ruby Arm (NOCA003) on Ross Lake for the months of July and August, Cascade Pass (NOCA006) for the month of July and Boundary Camp (NOCA007) for the month of August (Figure 1). Table 1 describes the locations and characteristics of the monitoring sites. These sites were also monitored in 2007 (NOCA003) and 2008 (NOCA006 and NOCA007); data for those years will be reported alongside current 2015 data (NPS 2007, NPS 2008). These three sites were chosen due to ...........
- Type
- Published Report
- Authors
- Brady, Sharon
- Date of Issue
- 2017-11
- Publisher
- National Park Service
- Units
- NOCA , NRSS , ROLA
- Keywords
- acoustical environment, Aircraft, amplitude, audibility, Backcountry, birds, decibel, extrinsic sound, Human, intrinsic sound, Inventory, LACH, Lake Chelan National Recreation Area, Monitoring, NOCA, Noise, North Cascades National Park Complex, ROLA, Ross Lake National Recreation Area, Soundscape, Stephen Mather Wilderness, Vehicle, Water, Watercraft, Wilderness
- Subjects
- Ecological Framework: Landscapes | Soundscape | Soundscape