Project Description: The Great Smoky Mountains (GRSM) long-term ecological monitoring program, known as “Vital Signs Monitoring”, was designed to provide the minimum infrastructure needed to track the overall condition of natural resources in parks and to provide early warning of situations that require intervention. GRSM vital signs are a subset of physical, chemical, and biological elements and processes of park ecosystems that are selected to represent the overall health or condition of park resources, effects of stressors, or elements that have important human values (NPS 2014). The GRSM ecological monitoring program began in the early 1990s and re-focused in 2011 toward critical natural resource issues, or Vital Signs, which reflect a new understanding of natural ecological processes and roles of an increased number of interacting stressors.
At the simplest level, vital signs monitoring seeks to track the condition of the resource, the trend of its condition, and the confidence with which the condition and trend are stated. As the GRSM’s resources do not exist in a vacuum, an integrated analysis is more telling of the ecosystem’s health and potential inter-relationships between vital signs. Assistance with analysis of related or co-located data across disciplines is a primary need. The main question to be addressed is: conduct trend analysis for all six vital signs to tease out which metrics within each vital sign are most informative and provide trigger points for concern. Additional secondary questions involve the interaction between different vital signs in terrestrial and aquatic systems, how climate changes and other threats impact the vital signs, and how observed trends within GRSM compare with historic and regional patterns.
Lead Principal Investigator: Dr. Noah Charney, University of Maine
Partner Institution: University of Maine
Federal Agency: National Park Service
Federal Agency Technical Contact: Mr. Paul Super
Project Type: Research
Project Discipline: Natural Resources
Project Sub-Discipline(s): Biological (Ecology, Fish, Wildlife, Vegetation, T&E)
Start Year: 2025
End Year: 2025
Initial Funding Amount: $59,871.48
Federal Grant Number: P25AC00141-00
Location: Great Smokey Mountains
National Park or Protected Area: Great Smoky Mountains (NPS)
State(s): Maine
Maine Counties: Penobscot
Products Associated with this Project:
- No products found.