Introduction 



Overview 



This report on the distri- 

 bution, abundance, and 

 health of our nation's biological resources is the 

 first product of the National Biological 

 Service's Status and Trends Program. This 

 information has many potential uses: it can 

 document successful management efforts so 

 resource managers will know what has worked 

 well; it can identify problems so managers can 

 take early action to restore the resource in the 

 most cost-efficient manner; and it can be used to 

 highlight areas where additional research is 

 needed, such as to determine why certain eco- 

 logical changes are occurring. This report will 

 also be useful to teachers, students, journalists, 

 and citizens in general who are interested in 

 national resource issues. 



Another purpose of this report is to help 

 identify gaps in existing resource inventory and 

 monitoring programs. It contains information 

 collected by a variety of existing research and 

 monitoring efforts by scientists in the National 

 Biological Service, other federal and state agen- 

 cies, academia. and the private sector. The pro- 

 grams that produced the information in this doc- 

 ument were not developed in a coordinated 

 fashion to produce an integrated, comprehen- 

 sive picture of the status and trends of our 

 nation's resources; rather, each was developed 



for its own particular purpose, usually to help 

 manage a specific resource. Thus, even though 

 articles vary greatly in scope, design, and pur- 

 pose, this report has identified and attempted to 

 combine many of the existing information 

 sources into a broad picture of the condition of 

 our resources. In the future, these sources will 

 be complemented by additional information 

 from other sources — such as state agencies and 

 other inventory and monitoring studies — to fill 

 in the gaps of knowledge and to provide a more 

 complete understanding of the status of our liv- 

 ing resources. 



A second report, to be released by the 

 National Biological Service in 1995. will use 

 the information contained in this report and data 

 from other sources to provide a synthesized 

 account of the status and trends of the naUon's 

 biodiversity. It will discuss from a historical 

 perspective the factors influencing biodiversity, 

 both natural and human-induced, and provide 

 an integrated description of the status and trends 

 of biological resources on a regional basis. 



Status and Trends 



The goal of inventory and monitoring pro- 

 grams is to determine the status and trends of 

 selected species or ecosystems. Status studies 



