Connecting Parks, Science and People 

 

Friends,   

 

At the Sonoran Institute, a hallmark of our work over the past 20 years has been our focus on building relationships to achieve more effective and enduring stewardship of the lands and resources that make the West special. Our brand of collaborative conservation works by making connections - between neighbors, between economic and environmental interests and, ultimately, between people and the natural and cultural resources we are striving to protect.  Normally this entails working "on the ground," at the local level; however, through a partnership with the National Park Service (NPS), we are also leading an effort to use cyberspace as a tool to help the NPS manage some of the most ecologically and historically significant resources in America. 

 

"Connecting parks, science, and people" is the mission of the Virtual Research Learning Center (VRLC) web application that is designed to communicate about research in the national parks. The VRLC provides a central repository for scholarly and scientific information about the parks, and makes this information available to park managers, researchers, educators, the media, and other members of the invested public in a way that is easy to understand and use. Including the two original VRLC websites, the Greater Yellowstone Science Learning Center and the Learning Center of the American Southwest, we now have seven sites under development from Maine to California.

 

"The goal is to deliver highly accessible scientific information, simple graphs, and straightforward text, not raw data," says the Institute's Pam Anning. Pam was instrumental in developing the template and underlying architecture that the VRLCs share, and she administers all seven sites. While they all share the same base code and format, each site manages its own content and has the flexibility to individualize its theme and appearance.   

 

Harnessing Information for Better Decisions

 

The VRLCs address a need at a time of unprecedented challenges for the NPS: ever-increasing human activity around the parks, the spread of invasive plants and pests, and the effects of climate change, as well as the pressures of budget cuts and deficits. In the face of these concerns, the NPS is relying more heavily on science to inform their resource management decisions. But how can busy park managers quickly get their hands on the most up-to-date resource information without having to hunt down and digest widely scattered, lengthy, and highly technical reports?

 

"Through the VRLC, a park manager, a county land-use planner or anyone else can instantly access a one-page document that has summarized and synthesized the best available knowledge about a particular resource," says Cheryl McIntyre, our lead on the NPS partnership. "If you are interested in knowing how grizzlies are doing in the Yellowstone area, for example, you can quickly find a resource brief that will tell you the grizzlies' status and trends and what the park service and other agencies are doing to manage them."

 

Organized in a hierarchy ranging from general topics to specific project results, the site includes an array of products spanning from resource briefs and fact sheets to podcasts and high-quality video. Users can drill down to increasingly detailed information on a particular topic - ultimately to the technical reports and contact information for the actual researchers who did the work in the field.

 

"The VRLC is a focused effort to get high-quality, relevant information in one place so it can be easily accessible and ready to use," Cheryl says.

 

A Resource-Centric Approach Brings a Broader Perspective

 

The Learning Center of the American Southwest serves 48 NPS park units in the region and includes close to 500 products addressing more than 150 topics and 90 projects. Dr. Rob Bennetts, program manager for the NPS Southern Plains Network, has been heavily involved with the VRLC development and works for an inventory and monitoring network that provides content to the site.

 

"The VRLCs are intended to complement the websites that the NPS has for each park," Rob says. "The park websites, by design, are oriented toward providing visitor services information. The resource information that is included is limited and confined to within that specific park unit. So if you are a researcher studying grasslands in the Southwest, you would have to go to 48 different park unit websites and patch together the information each one gives on grasslands in its park. The VRLC, on the other hand, is organized by resources rather than by park boundaries, so it gives you one place to go to gain a regional perspective about this resource."

 

Unexpected Benefits

 

For Janine Waller, acting editor of Yellowstone Science and head of the Greater Yellowstone Science Learning Center site, it is the coincidental uses of the VRLC that offer some of its most valuable benefits. "With the high turnover rate in the park service," she says, "we have discovered that the VRLC is priceless in terms of preserving institutional knowledge, by providing a place where people can consistently go to find up-to-date information, including new employees."

 

The VRLC has also proven useful in communicating about and providing transparency for decisions concerning such high-profile issues as the use of over-snow vehicles at Yellowstone. "Through the site, we can say, 'Here is the science that is available, here are some of the major issues, and here is the data to backup our policy,'" Janine says. "And, because it cross-lists information on winter use under all the resources it affects, the site helps people make those mental connections between the ways people use the park and how their activities affect the natural resources."

 

The VRLC provides a wonderful example of the kind of partnership, resource-sharing, and innovation that has become essential in an era of belt-tightening in the NPS, the entire Department of the Interior, and everywhere else. By allowing researchers to contribute more effectively to the body of knowledge we have about our national parks, by increasing the public's knowledge about our natural and cultural resources and how they may affect them, and by providing an efficient way for park managers to access the information they need to make the best possible resource conservation decisions, the VRLC is helping us all be better stewards of our most iconic landscapes.

 

Sincerely,   

 

Luther Propst

Executive Director