Taking Stock : Channel Islands Project Helps Train Scientists to Inventory Flora and Fauna

After a summer spent either on the water or in the water around the Channel Islands National Park, marine biologist Dan Richards and the crew of the Pacific Ranger were looking forward to one thing when they finished their work: water.

“We’re looking forward to a long hot shower after taking ship showers all week. The stall is really tiny. It’ll be nice to take a shower where you can move around a little.”

That cruise marked the end of the summer-long project to monitor the kelp forest in the park. At several intervals during the season, National Park Service scientists and volunteers dove into pre-established study areas around the islands to count kelp, tally tunicates and add up abalone.

“There’s a gorgeous diversity of plants and animals in the kelp forest,” Richards said. As many as 1,000 species, give or take a few.

Yet more than 200 years after Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus developed the modern system of classifying plant and animal species, park service scientists don’t have a method for taking inventory of the flora and fauna in America’s most treasured natural places.

Six years ago a researcher reported that the striped skunk had vanished from Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks. The animal was just one of many that had apparently become extinct in the West.

But the finding, based on visitor sightings, was erroneous. It turned out that no one bothered to report skunks because they’re so common. This drove home the point that the park service really had no idea what it had and what it didn’t have.

“The researcher mistook the absence of evidence as evidence of absence,” said David Graber, a biologist at Sequoia and Kings Canyon. “The researcher was relying on National Park Service databases that frankly stank.”

The Channel Islands kelp forest monitoring project is a small part of the solution. Researchers here and at four national parks have developed models to take inventory and monitor a variety of ecosystems so that scientists in green denim will be able to give the 250 parks in the national system an annual checkup.

“We’ve been at it for 15 years,” said Gary Davis, a marine biologist responsible for the design of the Channel Island project. “We’re just getting started.”

But Davis is far enough along to start training managers from other parks on how to take stock of the natural resources within their boundaries. The 30 Park Service scientists from around the country made a late summer visit to Anacapa Island, one of the five islands comprising the park, to participate in a tutorial on the procedure.

They watched intently as marine biologist Richards used a submersible camera and special diving mask to narrate live pictures of three scientists counting and measuring plants and animals in Anacapa’s Landing Cove.

Sarah Allen, an ecologist at the Park Service’s western regional office, was enthusiastic about the project. An inventory of species within parks, she said, helps biologists be resource managers rather than crisis managers.

“A doctor needs to know what the patient’s normal conditions are,” Davis said. “Physicians learned what the normal body temperature was by taking a survey. We need to learn the vital signs for an ecosystem and how those vital signs vary over time.”

The park service isn’t alone in its ignorance. The United States has no complete inventory of its species, but neither does the rest of the world. And, without a more thorough survey, scientists say they can’t be sure if a species is in trouble, where it is or how to preserve it.

The cataloguing approach marks a change in the way research funds are allocated. During the 1970s and well into the 1980s, biological inventories were not considered appropriate topics of study. Instead the focus was on individual species, in particular, those that were endangered or posed a menace. They have included silver sword plants in the Hawaiian islands, melaleuca trees in the Everglades, grizzly bears in Yellowstone and black bears in California parks.

“Taking an individual view of spotted owls or snail darters is bankrupting us,” Davis said. “In the long run, understanding the habitat and what drives it will be more cost effective.” It’s also more difficult and, in the short term, more expensive.

Surveying entire systems over long periods of time is an immense job and one that the Department of the Interior met in the truest governmental fashion: It established a new bureaucracy.

The National Biological Survey became operational in November, 1993, with a budget of $167.2 million. Personnel from the Interior Department’s seven other divisions--including the National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management--were recruited to staff the new bureau. Davis is one of the staffers.

“It used to be that money came in five-year blocks,” he said. “Well, in a five-year duration you can’t understand natural cycles like El Nino, which occurs at seven- to 12-year intervals.”

The narrow slice of time of most studies sometimes mistakes natural fluctuations in a population as evidence of permanent decline.

Just a few years ago, the Foothill yellow-legged frog was common in the Kawaeh River of Kings Canyon National Park. But a survey last summer failed to turn up a single one. A close cousin, the Mountain yellow-legged, is in steep decline, also.

Graber, a biologist with 15 years of experience in Sequoia and Kings Canyon, said the sudden decline in these and other amphibian species around the world might indicate a catastrophe or it might not.

The point is, he said, scientists don’t know how populations vary or how much of that change is natural.

Davis said that in the case of the kelp ecosystem, scientists aren’t completely without information. They get some data about commercial species that live within the ecosystem from commercial fishermen and the agencies that regulate them. A falloff in the abalone harvest helped scientists identify a catastrophic population decline. But what about the plants and animals you can’t eat?

Davis said the project inventories 75 types of plants and animals that are bellwethers for the ecosystem. In addition to the kelp forest, researchers also monitor 13 categories including intertidal zones, sandy beaches, land vegetation and sea birds.

After 750 man hours spent underwater this year, the results show that the kelp and associated animals are continuing their comeback after the devastation of the 1983 El Nino--a warm ocean current from the Equator that reduced diverse kelp forests to a barren sea floor containing little more than urchins.

“What we think happened was that the storms in the winter of 1982 tore out a lot of kelp,” Richards said. “All that drift kelp became food for urchins so they had a great year spawning.”

The following year, with all the kelp gone, Richards said the urchins had to start moving around to look for food. So they spread out, overtaking areas that were formerly lush kelp forests, and inhibited the regrowth.

It has taken until now for the fast-growing kelp to regain its former distribution in 14 of the 16 survey sites, said biologist Dave Kushner.

That’s the good news from the survey. The bad news, Kushner said, is that abalone numbers are still so low it’s difficult to monitor them and project a trend.

The inventory and monitoring project should help determine whether abalone declines are another result of El Nino or if human factors such as pollution or overfishing contributed significantly to the population crash.

In Southern California in the 1970s, the eight species of abalone found in waters off the Channel Islands National Park numbered as much as 5,000 per acre. Now biologists can find densities of only about 12 per acre.

Gary Davis said density is especially important because male abalone release clouds of sperm into the water while females release millions of eggs. If the male and female are more than one meter apart, Davis said chances of fertilization are greatly decreased.

Only rarely--perhaps once every six or seven years--do all the conditions line up just right to produce a successful spawning. Eggs eventually develop into larvae, and if they aren’t eaten by fish or killed by pollution, the larvae will eventually grow into baby abalone.

The habits of juvenile mollusks complicate the monitoring project. Until they reach the size of two to three inches, young abalone stay deeply hidden in rock crevasses, where they are difficult to count. Researchers couldn’t get an idea about what the adult population would be in five years.

The solution was to construct artificial habitats of concrete blocks held together by chicken wire. These abalone condos protect the baby gastropods from predators and can be quickly disassembled underwater for easy inspection of the inhabitants.

Back at Sequoia National Park, where Foothill yellow-legged frogs were once as common to the lakes as abalone were to the Channel Islands, researchers mark the progress of recovery by listening not for a robust “ribbittt,” but rather for an electronic chirp.

Reintroduced frogs have been implanted with electronic tags so researchers can track the population over the long-term. By passing a detecting wand over a captured frog, surveyors can identify exactly which frog they are holding.

“To prevent unnatural change, you need to recognize it and that takes an astounding amount of information,” said William Tweed, chief of planning at Sequoia. Reintroduction of the yellow-legged frogs and general inventory monitoring will be the foundation for answering such questions as how much change in amphibian populations is natural.

“It’s the sort of information,” said Tweed, “that’s expensive to obtain, but priceless to have.”