Managing vegetation within U.S. national parks: A policy analysis

Abstract

The development of U.S. national park vegetation management policies is briefly traced from 1872, when Yellowstone National Park was created, to the present. Ambiguities in legislative policies are described and partially resolved. Alternative vegetation management objectives, consistent with those policies, are evaluated using quantitative data from a giant sequoia-mixed-conifer forest community in Kings Canyon National Park. It is concluded from an analysis of this data that structural maintenance objectives are biologically infeasible in this forest community because the community does not have a fully regulated or steady-state distribution of aggregation types. Since such a steady-state distribution of aggregation types is probably not present in most forest communities, the Park Service is generally restricted to pursuing process maintenance objectives for vegetation within national parks and monuments. It is also pointed out that implementation of some process maintenance objectives is complicated by the need to return the forest community to its pre-fire exclusion state before reintroducing fire to the ecosystem. To do otherwise would perpetuate the changes in species composition and structure that have resulted from more than three-quarters of a century of fire exclusion. A new alternative for managing vegetation in national parks that is based on a high resolution description of the presettlement forest community, called the reconstruction-simulation approach, is also presented.