Natural resource condition assessment: Golden Gate National Recreation Area

National Park Service

The Natural Resource Condition Assessment (NRCA) Program aims to provide documentation about the current conditions of important park natural resources through a spatially explicit, multi-disciplinary synthesis of existing scientific data and knowledge. The objectives of this assessment are to evaluate and report on current conditions of key park resources, to evaluate critical data and knowledge gaps, and to highlight selected existing stressors and emerging threats to resources or processes. This report and the spatial datasets provided with it are intended to inform and support Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GOGA) managers and scientists in developing recommendations for improving or maintaining natural resource conditions in the park. Golden Gate National Recreation Area was established by Congress on October 27, 1972 as part of a movement to make NPS resources more accessible to urban populations and bring “parks to the people”. The park has grown into the largest urban national park unit in the United States, and includes under its management two additional NPS units Fort Point National Historic Site and Muir Woods National Monument. GOGA comprises approximately 80,000 acres of primarily coastal lands in the San Francisco Bay area. The park is rich in natural resources including 19 types of ecosystems in numerous distinct watersheds. The park provides habitat for many sensitive, rare, threatened, and endangered species, including the mission blue butterfly, northern spotted owl, and California red-legged frog. GOGA also has an abundance of historical and cultural assets, including sites such as early fortifications on Alcatraz Island, Forts Cronkhite and Barry in the Marin Headlands, Fort Mason, Fort Point, and the Presidio of San Francisco. Staff from the National Park Service (NPS) and the University of California, Berkeley worked together to identify the natural resources and stressors to include in this condition assessment. The list of priority resources to include in this report was further constrained by the need for sufficient existing information to allow a meaningful analysis. While this list of focal resources is not comprehensive, it includes the natural resources and stressors that are currently of the greatest concern to park management at GOGA. Only GOGA managed lands were included in the analyses in this report. The final report includes eight focal resources: Amphibians/California red-legged frog, breeding landbird diversity, forests, invasive plants, landuse context, rare plants, salmonids, and shorebirds. Assessment of the selected resources relied on gathering and reviewing existing literature and data for each focal resource and, where appropriate, analyzing the data in order to provide summaries and create new spatial representations. When possible, existing data for the established measures of each component were analyzed and compared to designated reference conditions. The impact of key stressors was also considered in the evaluation of current condition. The discussions of each focal resource included in Chapter 4 provide a comprehensive summary of available existing information regarding the current condition of these resources. Each focal resource assessed in this report was characterized by one or more indicators. Following analysis of each resource indicator, lead scientists worked with NPS collaborators to assign condition levels to the indicators and combine these into an overall resource assessment (as described in Chapter 3). Where data permitted, the future trend of each resource condition was also projected. When possible and useful for understanding the condition of the resource, the focal resource condition assessments were calculated for each GOGA management zone (i.e., Diverse Opportunities Zone, Scenic Corridor Zone, Evolved Cultural Landscape Zone, Historic Immersion Zone, Interpretive Corridor, Natural Zone, Sensitive Resources Zone, and Park Operations Zone...

Natural resource condition assessment: Golden Gate National Recreation Area

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