Vegetation Monitoring By The Southwest Alaska Network (SWAN): 2007-2025 — Data Package

Ground-based monitoring for the vegetation composition and structure vital sign for the Southwest Alaska Network (SWAN), focuses on documenting trends in the structure, composition, and demography of selected late-successional vegetation classes in response to environmental changes across three elevation bands (0-450 m; >450-900 m; >900 m) within the three largest parks: Katmai (KATM), Kenai Fjords (KEFJ), and Lake Clark (LACL). SWAN employed a Generalized Random-Tesselation Stratified (GRTS) sampling design, which involved a two-stage sampling scheme to ensure safety and accessibility while establishing permanent plots in selected vegetation classes. In order to focus on long-term changes rather than successional dynamics, the monitoring targeted specific vegetation classes that are common, late-seral, and sensitive to environmental changes, while avoiding early-successional classes. The selected vegetation associations included low elevation interior spruce forests, mid-elevation white spruce woodlands, low and dwarf shrub communities, and alpine dwarf shrub-fellfield communities, reflecting a gradient from warm coastal to colder alpine environments. Selected monitoring plots were revisited at approximately 5 year intervals, during which point intercept, nested quadrat frequency, tree censuses, and other structural and environmental measurements were performed.
Organization: Department of the Interior
Organization URL: https://catalog.data.gov/organization/doi
Last updated: 2026-06-09T00:00:00Z
Tags: Ecological Framework: Biological Integrity | Focal Species or Communities | Vegetation Complex, IMD, Inventory and Monitoring Division, KATM, KEFJ, Katmai National Park and Preserve, Kenai Fjords National Park, LACL, Lake Clark National Park and Preserve, NPS, National Park Service, SWAN, air temperature, ground based, monitoring, plant cover, protocol, sensitive plant communities, soil temperature, species diversity, structure, temperature, vegetation, vegetation composition, vegetation cover, vegetation diversity