Clay Pond has a rich history that is shared by other residents of the pond. Ask anyone there about the friendly turtle, and the other wonderful friends, like Lacy the Dragonfly, who have made this place a home over the past several years. Each creature has their own unique tale to tell. Everyone in this place looks out for the well being of all the others. If it were possible to claim each other as family, they would do it in a heartbeat. It is, in a word, a safe haven for anyone living in or around the pond. Many of my stories in this whole collection are based on true incidents in my writer life. As the reader, I hope you fall in love with this nature world as I have drawn it. The purpose of compiling these tales is to entertain, stir, or bring to remembrance some of the readers' own experiences as they step out into their own nature world around them.

The purpose of the National Park Service (NPS) Inventory & Monitoring (I&M) Program is to develop and provide scientifically credible information on the current status and long-term trends of the composition, structure, and function of park ecosystems, and to determine how well current management practices are sustaining those ecosystems. As part of the NPS's effort to improve park management through greater reliance on scientific knowledge, a primary role of the I&M Program is to collect, organize, and make available natural resource data and to contribute to the NPS institutional knowledge by transforming data into information through analysis, synthesis, and modeling of specific key vital signs. The I&M Program defines vital signs as a subset of physical, chemical, and biological elements and processes of park ecosystems that is selected to represent the overall health or condition of park resources, known or hypothesized effects of stressors, or elements that have important human values.

Since the late 1970s, the NPS Air Resources Division (ARD) has managed a comprehensive air quality program, emphasizing the collection of credible air quality information to support scientifically sound resource management decisions in parks. In general, air quality monitoring in parks, including monitoring of atmospheric deposition, ozone, and visibility, is done in conjunction with national networks. The authors describe the atmospheric deposition monitoring protocol.

Vegetation classification and mapping was conducted at Weir Farm National Historic Site during the fall of 2003 and the summers of 2004 and 2005, creating a current digital geospatial vegetation database for the park. There are nine natural vegetation types that occur in the park; four upland forest types, one upland non-vascular type, two forested wetland types, and two wetland shrub thicket types that reflected the soil moisture conditions of the site. In addition, four anthropogenic vegetation types occurred; one successional forest and three non-forested types (two in mowed upland fields, and one herbaceous wetland seep). Each of these is described in detail in this report.

This study measured wetland trends in the conterminous United States between 1998 and 2004. The estimates of estuarine emergent area were made prior to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita during the summer of 2005. The Cowardin et al. (1979) wetland definition was used to describe wetland types. By design, intertidal wetlands of the Pacific coast, reefs and submerged aquatic vegetation were excluded from this study.

This study was requested by the park in recognition of the need for soils information to assist in understanding the forest ecosystem, potential fire effects, management of trails and buildings, and for interpreting the Monument's cultural landscape. Existing soils information for Cook County provided only a very broad overview, with little or no field investigation to verify soil types or provide information at a level of detail pertinent to or useful for park needs.

A review of NPS species, the national database registering plant occurrence in parks, indicated that 465 plant species occurred in Hopewell Culture National Historical Park. Of these, 148 (32%) are non-native, meaning that these plants were recently introduced through human agency. The authors detail the status of invasive plants and the resource management issue(s) for the park.

Beaches serve as a natural barrier between the ocean and inland communities, ecosystems, and natural resources. However, these dynamic environments move and change in response to winds, waves, and currents. During extreme storms, such as powerful hurricanes, changes to beaches can be large, and the results are sometimes catastrophic. Lives may be lost, communities destroyed, and millions of dollars spent on rebuilding.

Market squid (Loligo opalescens) plays a vital role in the California ecosystem and serves as a major link in the food chain as both a predator and prey species.

This report to the Congress details the status and trends of our Nation's wetlands. It covers the period from 1986 to 1997, and provides the most recent and comprehensive estimates of the current status of wetland area throughout the conterminous United States and the losses or gains to various wetland types that have occurred during this time.

The purpose of this publication is to report the findings of the Service's wetlands inventory of Rhode Island.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), a nonregulatory Federal science agency with national scope and responsibilities, is uniquely positioned to serve the Nation's needs in understanding and responding to global change, which includes changes in climate; sea level; land use and land cover; ecosystems; and the global water, carbon, and nitrogen cycles. Global change is among the most challenging and formidable issues confronting our Nation and society. Scientists agree that global environmental changes during this century will have far-reaching societal implications Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2007; USGCRP, 2009]. In the face of these complex challenges, the Nation can benefit greatly by using natural science information in decisionmaking.

As part of the U.S. Geological Survey Priority Ecosystems Science initiative to provide the ecological science required during Everglades restoration, we have integrated current regional hydrologic models with American crocodile research and monitoring data to create a model that assesses the potential impact of Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan efforts on the American crocodile.

Although parasites play important ecological roles through the direct interactions they have with their hosts, historically that fact has been underappreciated. Today, scientists have a growing appreciation of the scope of such impacts. Parasites have been reported to dominate food webs (Bakker and others, 1997; Lafferty and others, 2006), alter predator-prey relationships (Lafferty and Morris, 1996), act as ecosystem engineers (Thomas and others, 1998, 1999), and alter community structure (Poulin, 1999; Wood and others, 2007). In spite of this growing awareness in the scientific community, parasites are still often neglected in the consideration of the management and conservation of resources and ecosystems (Marcogliese, 2004). Given that at least half of the organisms on earth are probably parasitic (Price, 1980; Windsor, 1998), it should be evident that the ecological functions of parasites warrant greater attention.

Increasingly, dry rangelands are being valued for multiple services beyond their traditional value as a forage production system. Additional ecosystem services include the potential to store carbon in the soil and plant biomass. In addition, dust emissions from rangelands might be considered an ecosystem detriment, the opposite of an ecosystem service. Dust emitted may have far-reaching impacts, for example, reduction of local air quality, as well as altering regional water supplies through effects on snowpack. Using an extensive rangeland monitoring dataset in the greater Canyonlands region (Utah, USA), we developed a method to estimate indices of the provisioning of three ecosystem services (forage production, dust retention, C storage) and one ecosystem property (nativeness), taking into account both ecosystem type and alternative states within that ecosystem type. We also integrated these four indices into a multifunctionality index. Comparing the currently ungrazed Canyonlands National Park watersheds to the adjacent Dugout Ranch pastures, we found clearly higher multifunctionality was attained in the Park, and that this was primarily driven by greater C-storage and better dust retention. It is unlikely to maximize all benefits and minimize all detriments at the same time. Some goods and services may have synergistic interactions; for example, managing for carbon storage will increase plant and biocrust cover likely lowering dust emission. Likewise, some may have antagonistic interactions. For instance, if carbon is consumed as biomass for livestock production, then carbon storage may be reduced. Ultimately our goal should be to quantify the monetary consequences of specific land use practices for multiple ecosystem services and determine the best land use and adaptive management practices for attaining multiple ecosystem services, minimizing economic detriments, and maximizing economic benefits from multi-commodity rangelands. Our technique is the first step toward this goal, allowing the simultaneous consideration of multiple targeted ecosystem services and properties.