Occurrences from Kenai National Wildlife Refuge’s Long Term Ecological Monitoring Program, 1999–2006

Kenai National Wildlife Refuge (KENWR) has a legislative mandate “to conserve fish and wildlife populations and habitats in their natural diversity”. To improve our understanding of spatial and temporal variation at the landscape level, we are developed the Long Term Ecological Monitoring Program (LTEMP) to assess change in biota on the sample frame used by the USDA Forest Service's Forest Inventory and Analysis program (FIA). Through a formal agreement with the FIA, we completed our baseline inventory of 259 permanent terrestrial plots systematically distributed at 5-km intervals across the 805,000-ha KENWR in 2004 and 2006. In addition to the forested vegetation sampled by the FIA, we sampled vascular and nonvascular plants on non-forested plots, and breeding landbirds, arthropods, and noise on all plots. All sampling methods are passive, nondestructive (to habitat), relatively inexpensive, and require ≤ 2 visits to a plot in a given sampling year. This occurrence dataset includes observations of plants by FIA crews from 1999 to 2003 and observations of plants and birds by KNWR crews in 2004 and 2006.