WILDERNESS MONITORING AND DATA MANAGEMENT

In the last decade, increased public interest in natural areas has res ulted in increased monitoring activity by federal wilderness managers to assess the status of wilderness values. Wilderness values are those large-scale entities of wilderness which comprise, in sum, wilderness character. Data collected through wilderness monitoring must support the maintenance of wilderness values. Wilderness monitoring must inclu de the development of clear data management strategies and provisions for hypothesis testing. Unfortunately, some monitoring programs do not support the status assessment of wilderness values. Often wilderness monitoring programs have neglected even the most rudimentary principle s of data management. This paper presents a model for wilderness monit oring, guidelines for data management, and an overview of a PC-compati ble wilderness monitoring data base, the Monitoring Information Data A nalysis System (MIDAS).