Monitoring and Assessing the Condition of Sandscapes of the Apostle Island National Lakeshore: Evaluation and Recommendations

Leach, Mark

The United States National Park Service is responsible for maintaining the natural sandscapes of the Apostle Island National Lakeshore in northern Wisconsin. These areas include several of the best examples of natural beach, dune, and swale vegetation remaining in the Great Lakes region. In 1988 Park Service staff initiated a monitoring program to provide baseline data, detect change, and provide information useful for management decisions. Seventeen sites were sampled between one and nine times through 2005. A “modified step-point sampler” was used to record “hits” (i.e., point touches a plant) or “near hit” (i.e., point does not touch a plant, but the nearest plant in an 180 degree arc is recorded). The purpose of this report is to review these methods. I probed the data by applying a variety of analytic techniques as I would with any other time-series vegetation studies. The results reveal the data appears to be useful in detecting trends in the increase in bare ground. However, this exercise has convinced me that the point-sample method has severe limitations. I make the case for the National Park Service to switch sampling methods to one collecting coverage data in 1-m2 quadrats