Petrified Forest National Park sandy loam upland 2019 data summary: Southern Colorado Plateau Network integrated upland monitoring
Swan M, McCoy L, Veety C. 2020. Petrified Forest National Park sandy loam upland 2019 data summary: Southern Colorado Plateau Network integrated upland monitoring. Natural Resource Data Series. NPS/SCPN/NRDS—2020/1299. National Park Service. Fort Collins, Colorado
This report presents a single-year snapshot of the data collected by the Southern Colorado Plateau Inventory and Monitoring Network (SCPN) in 2019 as part of integrated upland monitoring (IUM). Field crews collect data on soil stability and hydrologic function, biological soil crusts, and plant community characteristics, including abundance of functional groups, cover by species, richness and diversity, and frequency of nonnative species. In woodland and forested systems, density of seedlings, saplings and overstory tree species and canopy shading are measured. These data are summarized in a series of simple visualizations to provide a status overview for the year. Through this monitoring, SCPN seeks to increase understanding of upland systems and provide resource managers with valuable information they can use to help guide management decisions. IUM field crews sampled 20 plots in the sandy loam ecosystem at Petrified Forest National Park in 2019. We encountered two nonnative grass species, Hordeum murinum and Bromus rubens for the first time in our plots, but these species were already on the park list. Prickly Russian thistle (Salsola kali) and cheatgrass continued to be present in most of the plots we sampled. In addition to fieldwork, in 2019 SCPN published the first IUM trend report looking at change over time in Petrified Forest National Park grasslands. We used Bayesian hierarchical models to investigate patterns of change in the cover of functional groups, species richness and soil stability from 2007, when we began monitoring, through 2018. We found that although these responses fluctuated in response to seasonal precipitation between years, there was little evidence of any strong directional change over time once we removed the effect of changing precipitation between years.
- Type
- Published Report
- Authors
- Swan, Megan; McCoy, Lee; Veety, Carrie
- Date of Issue
- 2020-12
- Publisher
- National Park Service
- Units
- NRSS , PEFO , SCPN
- Keywords
- Exotic species, Grassland, Monitoring, Plant community characteristics, Soil stability, Upland vegetation