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ExpectMore.govExpectMore.gov home pageEXPECT FEDERAL PROGRAMS TO PERFORM WELL, AND BETTER EVERY YEAR.
 
Program Assessment

Program

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National Park Service - Natural Resource Stewardship

This program monitors and preserves natural resources and wildlife habitat within the National Park System. The National Park Service (NPS) directly manages these resources through a variety of means that range from maintaining basic inventories to full-scale restoration of disturbed park lands and ecosystems.

Rating

What This Rating Means

PERFORMING
Moderately Effective

In general, a program rated Moderately Effective has set ambitious goals and is well-managed. Moderately Effective programs likely need to improve their efficiency or address other problems in the programs' design or management in order to achieve better results.
  • The program planning and management has improved significantly as a result of the Natural Resource Challenge. For example, this multi-year initiative is identifying for each park the park "vital signs" that can be used to monitor the condition of park resources.
  • NPS has not yet finished efforts on isolating the most important vital signs to measure ecosystem health. Many park biologists do not yet know how their park natural systems work well enough to identify a few key parameters.
  • The program generally meets its goals. For example, it has completed 64% of the nearly 2,800 data sets of natural resource inventories.

Improvement Plan

About Improvement Plans

We are taking the following actions to improve the performance of the program:

  • Completing all data sets, particularly those required as a baseline for park vital signs.
  • Prioritizing which vital signs in a given park will be used to monitor ecosystem health.
  • Using Exotic Plant Management Teams and other tools to improve the efficiency of restoring disturbed lands in national parks and aid other agencies in setting up similar teams.

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