Plant Species Data from Wetland Monitoring at Cuyahoga Valley National Park, 2008-2025

Cuyahoga Valley National Park includes nearly 2,000 wetlands within its legislative boundary that feed, filter, and protect an extensive network of headwater streams as well as our namesake, the Cuyahoga River. They also provide important habitats and other ecological services within the park. Because of their sensitivity to surrounding land use, we monitor wetlands as part of the National Park Service’s vital signs monitoring program.

These datasets address one of our protocol objectives: To identify temporal changes in wetland condition at CUVA, using intensive methods (i.e., the Vegetation Index of Biotic Integrity (Mack and Gara 2015)). Intensive methods such as the VIBI are sensitive enough to detect change over time more quickly than rapid methods, but the survey is labor intensive so less wetlands are sampled. The intensively assessed wetlands included randomly selected “survey sites” and intentionally selected “sentinel sites”. Sentinel sites are further broken down into “reference” sites and “wetlands of management concern” sites. This information can be found in the locations table (`SurveyType`). Two years of vegetation data is available for survey sites and three years of data are available for sentinel sites. Most wetlands of management concern have multiple VIBI plots because they are large wetland complexes and we surveyed several unique dominant plant community / hydrogeomorphic class combinations.

Permanent corner stakes are deployed and survey tapes are stretched within these boundaries carefully to minimize intra-observer error, however taxonomic skill grew over time, resulting in some minor ID error across survey years.