New Report Shows Yellowstone Healthy But Facing Challenges

http://www.nps.gov/yell/parknews/09080.htm
New Report Shows Yellowstone Healthy But Facing Challenges

Yellowstone National Park is doing well, but is experiencing impacts from changes taking place both inside and outside the park’s boundaries.
Details of these changes, their degree of impact, and how they may be interrelated, are spelled out in the “Superintendent’s 2008 Report on Natural Resource Vital Signs”. The report reviews available research and data on more than two dozen areas, in order to monitor the health of the park’s natural resources.
This first in what is intended as an annual series of reports represents the first time the park has taken a comprehensive look at this body of knowledge in an attempt to assess overall impacts in order to aid management decisions.
A review of the report shows that time, money and effort put toward a challenge like grizzly bear recovery can result in success. It indicates more attention and effort should be paid to issues like the decline of Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout, and the park’s resident Trumpeter Swan population. It also raises concerns about how air pollution from outside the park may be changing native plant habitat inside the park.
The idea for this comprehensive review and report dates back to the National Park Service’s 1999 “Natural Resource Challenge”, whose goals included putting more scientific information in the hands of park managers.
The 2008 report and a wealth of other natural and cultural resource information can be found on the Greater Yellowstone Science Learning Center website at http://www.greateryellowstonescience.org/.
- www.nps.gov/yell -

See http://www.greateryellowstonescience.org/files/pdf/YELL_08_vital_signs_rep.pdf to go directly to 2008 Superintendents Report.
However, the Greater Yellowstone Science Center website has lots of resources. Check out the Yellowstone Atlas, for example

---

The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.
-- Carl Sagan