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wilderness through WildLink Teams made up of students from the participating schools, and web lessons consisting of online journals, pictures, and artwork developed in wilderness by their peers. Lessons are molded from the Arthur Carhart Wilderness Training Center’s high school Wilderness and Land Ethics Curriculum to fit the web medium as well as state and national academic standards. Special webbased projects like Shadows in the Range of Light: Buffalo Soldiers of the Sierra Nevada (www. shadowsoldier. org) flesh out the historical context of wild places from culturally diverse American perspectives. View WildLink’s progress at www.wilderness.net. The WEP is a model that works for California. It costs each participating agency $2,000 to $6,000 to fund the program and would work in areas with urban proximate wilderness and multiple agencies to spread the burden of the cost. IJW WEP Program Coordinator BARB MIRANDA has a BS in forest management from Colorado State University. A long-time wilderness ranger and educator, Barb has worked in the Sierra, the Cascades, and the Bighorn Mountains in the United States and the Harz Mountains in Germany. Telephone: (209) 372-0735. E-mail: Barbara_Miranda@nps.gov. Today we have more than 3,000 scout leaders trained in Leave No Trace skills, an established cadre of 50 horsemen and women, who in 1999 alone educated 6,000 stock users in minimum impact skills, and an annual budget of over $100,000. The WildLink Team deep in the wilds of the Sierra Nevada. Photo by Barb Miranda. WildLink endeavors to reach culturally diverse high school students in California’s Central Valley, Los Angeles, and the eastern Sierra with lessons in science, geography, social studies, and language arts. International Journal of Wilderness DECEMBER 2000 • VOLUME 6, NUMBER 3 37
SCIENCE & RESEARCH Are the decisions and actions taken to protect the benefits of wilderness producing their intended out comes? All the best intentions and planning mean little if federal agencies are unable to assess the effectiveness of their management policies. Monitoring is simply collecting data describing how trends are changing over time, and there are two wilderness-specific monitoring goals. First is taking care of wilderness today and in the future. This goal requires management monitoring and national system monitoring. Management monitoring provides information on resource conditions and public perceptions to improve the management of a specific wilderness. In contrast, national system monitoring provides information on the overall status and trends of wilderness conditions and public perceptions within a region or the nation. This system information is used for managing regional and national wilderness programs as well as setting policy. The second wilderness monitoring goal is learning from wilderness. This goal requires benchmark or reference monitoring of ecological and social conditions in wilderness and seeking information to understand the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) and long-term changes caused by human activities. Although the importance of monitoring has long been recognized, no comprehensive wilderness monitoring program has ever been established in the four federal wilderness agencies. These agencies have long monitored particular resources of interest, but for a variety of reasons 38 International Journal of Wilderness DECEMBER 2000 • VOLUME 6, NUMBER 3 PERSPECTIVES from the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute Wilderness Monitoring—New Directions and Opportunities BY PETER LANDRES this information is typically of limited use to wilderness managers. Several new agency efforts may improve wilderness monitoring. The Forest Service’s (FS) most recent national wilderness agenda includes strategies for wilderness monitoring, including an information needs assessment to link wilderness monitoring to agency-wide database efforts, and a committee to develop programmatic recommendations for such monitoring. The National Park Service (NPS) is developing a database for reporting on the status of its wilderness. The NPS inventory and monitoring prototype is expanding to include additional parks and types of information that will be useful to NPS wilderness managers. Both the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) monitor site-specific resources of interest, and both agencies have new programs that should support expanded monitoring in wilderness. The FWS’s new strategic vision, Fulfilling the Promise, strongly supports both wilderness and monitoring. Likewise, the BLM’s new National Landscape Conservation Lands program will likely require increased monitoring in wilderness. All the agencies are developing new and better information for wilderness planning and management, and monitoring is included. The Leopold Institute is deeply involved in the FS’s monitoring efforts and will continue to advocate and work toward well-planned, integrated, and practical wilderness monitoring. IJW PETER LANDRES is a research ecologist at the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute. E-mail: plandres@fs.fed.us.
Page 2 and 3: FEATURES 3 EDITORIAL PERSPECTIVES W
Page 4 and 5: Rivers are magic. Their draw is irr
Page 6 and 7: This river is wild, and it is the c
Page 8 and 9: The Value of Wilderness to the U.S.
Page 10 and 11: People attach values, feelings, and
Page 12 and 13: and the wilderness that distinguish
Page 14 and 15: Salmon. On both rivers, boaters mus
Page 16 and 17: typically had evident human waste,
Page 18 and 19: The San Marcos River Wetlands Proje
Page 20 and 21: public and private, for each of the
Page 22 and 23: This will allow increased visitatio
Page 24 and 25: from its headwaters in the Rocky Mo
Page 26 and 27: The coalition brings together “co
Page 28 and 29: A Community-Based Wilderness Educat
Page 30 and 31: for a two-course sequence (a one-cr
Page 32 and 33: Wilderness as Teacher Expanding the
Page 34 and 35: are (1) that ethics consist primari
Page 36 and 37: The Central and Southern Sierra Wil
Page 40 and 41: Autonomous Agents in the Park An In
Page 42 and 43: Existing data and management practi
Page 44 and 45: onmental conditions according to th
Page 46 and 47: Bob Marshall on a trip in the Queti
Page 48 and 49: Keith Corrigall Wilderness Stewards

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