FWS NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE SYSTEM WILDERNESS FELLOWS

REPORT ON WILDERNESS CHARACTER MONITORING

XXXXXXXX Wilderness

Prepared by XXXXXXXXX

DateXXXXXXXX

CONTENTS(the audience for this Report is refuge staff, NWRS I&M Program staff, and potentially anyone who is interested in this refuge and wilderness)

Setting of the Refuge Wilderness(probably 2-5 pages and this could most likely be pulled directly from the CCP and other refuge documents; use your judgment about what to include and not include)

Geographic setting

Ecological setting

History of establishing the wilderness

Refuge purposes

Documents Consulted(a listing of the paper and electronic documents, such as the CCP, that you looked at to help you identify what measures to use; after you’re no longer there this will help everyone understand what you referenced when you were at the refuge)

Staff Consulted(a listing of the names and titles of the staff you talked with to help you identify measures)

Process used for identifying measures(describe how you went about identifying measures that you finally selected; the more detail the better)

Measures used(a detailed description for each measure organized by quality and indicator)

Measure(the name or descriptive title of the measure)

2012 Data value (the actual data value you gathered for this measure)

Significant change (describe how a change in the data value will be determined to be a significant change or not; this could be a percentage, say 10% change between monitoring periods, or it could be a number, say 100 acres of increased nonnative plant occurrence)

Data adequacy(your and staff judgment about the quality and quantity of the data; this includes spatial and temporal adequacy of the data)

Source and protocol (the source could be a person, say the refuge biologist, or a website that’s providing regional data, or field data collection;the protocol lays out exactly how the data value was derived and allows those who follow you to be consistent in using the same source and protocol in subsequent monitoring of the measure)

Weighting (if a weighting scheme is use, the weight of this measure within the indicator)

Frequency of data collection (how often data will be collected for the measure; this could vary from data collected every year to once every 5 years depending on how much the measure changes from year to year)

Context and relevance(describe why this measure is appropriate for this indicator and for the refuge, and any context for understanding or interpreting trend in the measure; e.g., why a measure might always show a degrading trend and the refuge can’t do anything about it, or why a measure shows a degrading trend but this is because of a purposeful decision to improve something else such as requiring campers to use designated campsites to improve solitude)

Measures not usedand why (a list of the measures that you considered but ultimately chose not to use—this will be helpful in the future so people don’t spend time going down this same path; there are all sorts of different reasons for not using a measure such as low relevance, or high relevance but no data, or data from one point in time but data collection won’t be repeated, or good data from one small portion of the wilderness but not anywhere else, or many other reasons)

Conclusions(describe in as much detail as you want your thoughts about the thoroughness or completeness of the set of measures used to monitor trend in wilderness character at this refuge, and your thoughts about the future trend in wilderness character and the factors likely to affect this trend)

Appendices

Priority ranking of all measures considered(this shows how all measures, both used and those not used, ranked out on each of the criteria used in developing the priority ranking)

Summary of effort required for wilderness character monitoring (this will be a summary from the Excel spreadsheet that tracks effort for all measures)

Data sources and protocols for all measured used(this is just a cut-and-paste of what you already wrote for each of the “measures used,” and it just puts this information in one place that we can easily access later on)