Oral Histories: Documenting the People and Stories Behind the Science at Channel Islands National Park

Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and the National Park Service collaborated for an oral history project: Oral Histories: Documenting the People and Stories Behind the Science at Channel Islands National Park. The purpose of this project was to interview various scientists who have contributed important research for the Channel Islands.

You may listen to or download these interviews. Please note that these are audio files only.

 

• Marla Daily

  
  

  Marla Daily is a cultural anthropology graduate of the University of California Santa Barbara and California Channel Islands historian. Daily has been President of the Santa Cruz Island Foundation since December 1987. Date: August 19, 2009 Interviewer: Timothy Babalis Santa Barbara, California

  Date created:

  08/19/2009

  Audio Transcript

  Interview: Marla Daily

  Date: August 19, 2009

  Interviewer: Timothy Babalis

  Santa Barbara, California

  Timothy:  Okay this is Timothy Babalis, the date is August 19, 2009. I’m in Santa Barbara talking to Marla Daily, who is the president (is that correct?) of the Santa Cruz Island Foundation.

  Daily:  This is Marla Daily.  I was born December 15, 1950.  I’ve been with the Santa Cruz Island Foundation since it was formed in 1985 by Dr. Carey Stanton. I became the president of the Foundation December 8, 1987, when Carey Stanton died.

  Timothy:  So I want to start with your first involvement with Santa Cruz Island and with Dr. Carey Stanton. Could you tell me about that?

  Daily:  I’d be happy to. My career actually, I am indebted to Dr. Glassow, Mike Glassow, an anthropology teacher at UCSB, where I was a student. I was graduated in 1973; Mike Glassow had an NSF grant to work with Albert Spaulding doing an archeological survey of Santa Cruz Island. I needed to have a summer job, Mike called me into his office and said, “I have one paid position.  It’s the cook.  Are you interested? There will be twelve of us. Your duties will include organizing the meals, doing the prep work, organizing the kitchen and doing the food ordering. And it pays a thousand dollars.” And I said, “I would be absolutely delighted.” So we first went to Santa Cruz Island in March of 1973 to look over the field station, the kitchen facilities, and we returned in the summer. I don’t have the dates handy off the top of my head, but we returned in the summer for six weeks.  And because I was the cook, also doing archeology, I was in the unique position of not going into the field all day long with the two graduate students and all the undergrads because I had to prepare things in the kitchen. And that gave me the entree to the main ranch where I met Carey Stanton, Dr. Stanton to me at the time, who welcomed me and said this is where the walk-in cooler is, feel free to keep whatever you need to in there, there is plenty of space, and I thanked him. And as the summer progressed, the six weeks, I would go down to the ranch--I was the only one in the group that was able to drive a jeep down to the ranch--walk right into the ranch house to the cooler, the walk-in cooler, and Carey would often come out and say, “Marla, come in, sit, talk.” And I was shaking at the knees and I would go in and very timidly, with good posture, sit and just sort of stare at things in the office. And he was a very casual, kind man with a brain that was just always thinking. He wanted to know everything; he was the most interested person I ever met. He was interested in everything--all subjects of scientific endeavors, what people were doing, human relations.  He was a marvelous raconteur and he was born in 1923, I was born in 1950, so he was quite my senior, and that’s how we became friends. And I started preparing extra dishes for him when I was making the meals for summer field and I would take down casseroles and things and leave them down in the walk-in and let him know that I brought down lasagna or whatever it was and he was very appreciative because at the ranch they only had five meals that were served. One, two, three, four, five; one, two, three, four, five. Not seven meals, five meals.  And when I asked him about that he said that living on an island it was far too difficult to try and maintain any sort of a varied grocery list. During the time that I ended up working for Dr. Stanton, one of the things I did for him was, pre-computers in those days, was type an organized list so that he could call in the groceries. I still have the list here somewhere, but it was always the exact same list of groceries: so many cases of peanut butter, peas, whatever it was that he had on his list.  It was the same list and he would call it in to his--I think they were Hungarian, grocery store in Port Hueneme. He’d call in the grocery list. Henry the ranch superintendent, would go in, do an inventory of what was left in the pantry, call the order in.  The little mom and pop grocery store would deliver the cases of everything to put it on the Navy boat and then Dr. Stanton, Henry, and I, if I was there, would go down to the pier at Prisoners’ Harbor and pick up the groceries. And then, it was obviously a quite a laborious task, and then as soon as the groceries got there one of the things that Henry did, who was the superintendent on Santa Cruz Island at this time, he would sit down and go through and do an inventory, make sure everything was here.  And if it wasn’t he’d call in and say we’re missing a case of onions or we’re missing a case of seasoning salt, whatever it was. So that’s how my relationship with Carey Stanton developed.

  Timothy: So you were working with the field station for one season and then after that you came into the employ of Dr. Stanton?

  Daily: No, what happened, I’ll be more specific. I worked the summer of 1973 for UCSB.  At that time Lyndal Laughrin was the only employee working for the Santa Cruz Island Reserve and he had no relief. And in 1974 when the archeological group came out, he met a woman he was interested in; he was between marriages, and he wanted to go off to Mexico to meet her and he didn’t have anyone to stay behind and babysit the field station. So I actually became employed as Lyndal’s associate—assistant--to babysit the field station when he wanted time off the island. And so from 1974 until 1980 I was Lyndal’s assistant, and I would go out to the island so he would have time off.  And during that time I learned how to change the oil in the generators at the main ranch, to fill scuba tanks with air for dive classes that came out.  It was a very broad position; I painted, did maintenance, did whatever was necessary, picked groups up from the pier, acting as their driver, assessed who was qualified to drive and basically did the duties of the University caretaker of that facility. And I continued to do that until 1980 when the University eliminated my position, which was concurrent with Lyndal having become engaged to his second wife, and my position was eliminated. The reason being the University was able to redesign the position so that the person who would be Lyndal’s stand-in or assistant, if they were a student at the University, there was a way that different budgets could pay for them and so my position was eliminated on those grounds. And I went down to the ranch, I’ll never forget the day I went down to the ranch and I told Dr. Stanton that unfortunately my position had been eliminated, because from 1973 to 1980 when I was on the Island working at the field station for the University, I was a pro bono, if you will, employee for Carey Stanton and spent an incredible amount of time helping to organize his library, his collections, getting to know him, doing oral history interviews with him, with Henry. I became fascinated with cultural history of the Channel Islands.  My degree was in cultural anthropology with an emphasis on history and so Carey would humor me and I would sit for hours and hours and tape record him and listen and ask questions, and he was always so kind and so interested, not only in the subject, but in the fact that someone was interested in what his interests were. And I don’t think he had really had that before, so we had a very special relationship in that sense.  It was just wonderful. So 1980, fast forwarding, I told him that my position had been eliminated and he said, “Would you become my employee?” and I said, “I’d be honored.” And he said, “Now it’s not going to be a traditional type of employment. I don’t want you to leave. I want you to catalogue my library; I want you to continue the work you have been doing for me and I’m going to write you a check for thirty thousand dollars.” In 1980 that was a lot of money. And he said, “What’s your checking account?  Where do you bank?” And he said, “Well it doesn’t matter, I want you to bank at Security Pacific where I bank. I’m going to do a direct transfer. And I want you to keep a notebook and I want you to keep track of your hours and you tell me when the money runs out.”

  Timothy: Not exactly your traditional employment?

  Daily: No. But it was a way, I think, for him. I certainly felt good about it. I knew then that he didn’t want me to leave the island, and that he valued the friendship that we had developed and our mutual interests. So I also worked on the mainland part-time working for a rare book dealer, from ’78 to ’85, about. Maurice Neville Rare Books, and through that job I was always finding, for example, the paintings that you see here in this room, or when the Alexander Harmer Trust was being dispersed, I found out about it. I called Carey; he flew in from the island, he went and looked at the paintings, he told me which ones he wanted to buy and I dealt with James Hansen who had the paintings. And Carey was able to acquire the paintings he wanted. And whenever rare books came up, since I’d catalogued Carey’s library I knew what he didn’t have and that was an ongoing relationship that we had. I think in today’s day and age, I would be called a personal assistant, but that wasn’t, I didn’t have any specific title, I was a jack-of-all-trades, do whatever was needed. Whenever he would have groups come out to the island, his friends--he had the same set of friends that he’d had since his years at Stanford, about a dozen people-- and those, that was his core of his social family, really, they were his family, and I became a part of that and I would coordinate with the maid in the kitchen to make sure that the ham was okay, that the French bread was okay, that the Boston baked beans were okay. He had his little menus. And I became a social hostess when he had gatherings of friends.

  Timothy: What was the social life like then? Could you describe one of these gatherings?

  Daily: Carey’s life was very, very rigid, very orchestrated. During the day there were appropriate times for different things.  One gets up at six; you don’t shower in the morning, you work all day long until five. When you stop work, that’s when you shower, have some relaxing time from five to six, then you make your phone calls from six to seven or that’s your cocktail hour, then at seven and the maid rings the bell and that’s where dinners are served. One, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five. Dinner was formal, coat and tie for him; I had to wear a dress and stockings and ring the silver bell. It was very, I’d call him a practicing Victorian who was very set in his ways. And for me I was a hippie chick from the 60s and for me to be exposed to this was just a wonderment to me, to be, to have this opportunity to be in this situation. When he would have friends come out, his friends always stayed in the same guest rooms, year after year, there was the Diebenkorn room, there was the room for his paramour, Marion Witbeck, whom he had dated since the 40s since they were colleagues at Stanford.  She didn’t finish, she dropped out before graduating, and he went on to go to medical school, which was an abbreviated three-year program because of the war.  He became a pathologist. He wasn’t comfortable dealing with people; he went into pathology because he didn’t have to deal with people’s emotions and personalities.  He liked the dead aspect of it; it was less complicated. He was always very stiff, emotionally stiff; when someone would hug him he’d sort of go into this vertical state of rigor, and he’d raise his right arm and, too hard, pat someone on the back as if they were a dog.  He wasn’t comfortable with sort of the relaxed type of behavior that most people exhibit. He was an alcoholic and he became an alcoholic early in life I believe, and alcohol became, alcohol was his way of being able to relax and be comfortable and not be formal. And it became a problem eventually in his life, and in 1973, he realized it and he stopped drinking, cold turkey. And that was the year his mother died, November 20^th.  His best friend, one of his best friends, probably his best friend at the time, a fellow physician, Steve Royce, committed suicide. And those two events, I believe, knocked him into sobriety. And he stayed sober, so when I started working for him in 1973, he had stopped drinking. I never got to meet his mother; she died later that same year. And he stayed sober until 1980, when he fell off the wagon.  That was the first time I had experienced that; I saw a whole different man I had never seen before.

  Timothy: Not pleasant. 

  Daily: He was perfectly jolly; he was the happiest drunk in the world. He was a very, people loved his personality when he was drunk because he could be very cutting and acerbic in his normal day-to-day operations, if something rubbed him the wrong way or something wasn’t right.  He could make, what I would consider to be, inappropriate and actually cruel remarks once in awhile to people that weren’t following instructions. He was sort of intolerant of a lot of  things; he was very intolerant if anyone, for example, contacted him who wanted to write an article about Santa Cruz Island.  And he would get very annoyed and generally not give anyone permission because so much of what had been written was inaccurate.  It was misinformation, and he was such a stickler for detail, he demanded accuracy. And the few who were allowed--Chuck Hillinger being one, who became a friend-- who were allowed to write about the island had to submit whatever it was to him for publication for approval to make sure it was accurate.  And that was just one of the things that gave him great joy, was punctuality, accuracy, dressing appropriately--just a different lifestyle. His friends would generally fly to the island.  At first it was, well there was a series of planes--Murray Aviation, Wally Bassett, before he was killed in an accident out at Christy; and in 1975 Channel Islands Aviation began flying out of Oxnard Airport and then they actually opened up a facility at Camarillo Airport and Carey used them from 1975 until his death in 1987.

  Timothy: Was that when they were founded? CIA?

  Daily: 1975.  Mark Oberman and Tom Driscoll, yes.

  Timothy: Okay.

  Daily: They had a Beech, a giant twin Beech that they landed at the main ranch strip.

  Timothy: Henry, is it Henry Duffield, the superintendent of the ranch?

  Daily: Mmhmm.

  Timothy: Could you tell me a little bit about him?

  Daily: Henry Duffield was a rancher, he was born in Michigan. I have files on Henry; he was married to an opera singer named Carolyn. And, oh, I can’t recall now, in his thirties--maybe thirty-five or six--he had been a rancher, a cattle rancher in Cuba, he had been a cattle rancher in Central Mexico and he contracted polio and his wife divorced him.  And he was in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, on the beach with a Mexican kid that was obviously his employee, trying to help him to learn to walk, on the sand.  And Carey Stanton and his friend Steve Royce had gone to Puerto Vallarta on a trip and they were sitting at a bar on the sand watching this scene of this obviously paralyzed man having a Mexican kid pick him up and fall down in the sand and pick him up and fall down in the sand, so Carey and Steve Royce went over and befriended Henry and said come on over and have a drink with us. So Henry sat down, they started talking and his physician, Steve and Carey were saying why don’t you go to Warm Springs, Georgia for rehab? It was the polio rehab made famous by Roosevelt and they recommended that Henry go to Warm Springs, Georgia for rehab. And Henry took them up on their suggestion, they parted and while Henry was in rehab, Carey-- I gather that Henry kept in contact--I don’t know how, I don’t have letters, but I know that Carey invited Henry to visit Santa Cruz Island when he got out of rehab. And Ed Stanton, there was a family scene that was rather unpleasant I gather, probably not in front of anyone, but Carey told me that when Henry was coming to the island, Mrs. Stanton--who by the way did not have a background of elitism or upper class; she certainly when she married Ed Stanton acquired it. And when Henry was coming to the island, I believe it was 1960, again I have the dates in my file, she thought he should eat with the staff and Ed Stanton said I’ll have nothing of it.  He’s our son’s guest, he’ll eat with the family, and he did. So Henry had dinner with Carey and his parents, and Ed Stanton, after talking to Henry and learning about his qualifications as a cattle rancher, said, “Would you like to work for me?”  And so Ed Stanton actually hired Henry Duffield to be the ranch manager on Santa Cruz Island. And at that point Henry moved to Santa Cruz Island where he stayed for the next 26 years of his life, until ultimately he committed suicide because of his deteriorating health. And Ed Stanton died in 1963, so then he continued to work for Carey.

  Timothy: Quite a story.  He must have been very grateful to the Stanton family for that opportunity?

  Daily: I don’t know.  He never expressed gratitude that I can think of, much.  It didn’t really fit into it. He was so, so much a part of the island that I never thought of it in those terms and I don’t think he ever, to me anyway, indicated gratitude.

  Timothy: Okay. I wanted to ask about, well there are plenty of stories about when the National Park became interested in Santa Cruz Island and Donald Robinson, I believe, was the superintendent of, what was then the monument. And…

  Daily: You’ve probably heard the story.

  Timothy: I’ve heard the story, so maybe I don’t need to introduce it, would you like to talk about that? I’d like to hear your version of that story.

  Daily:  Well I can preface this by saying that Carey Stanton used to say that his parents left him an albatross tied around his neck, with the ownership of Santa Cruz Island.  He felt that it was such an enormous burden to have this responsibility, that was his and his alone to decide the future of Santa Cruz Island beyond his death. And Carey was a very practical man, being a pathologist he dealt with corpses, he realized he had to make some sort of arrangements for Santa Cruz Island.  There’s a whole other chapter of this; you’re aware of this I’m sure, where his nephew owned one third-undivided interest in the island and after Carey’s mother died, the nephew sued Carey in a partition action. Carey expressed to me many, many, many times his great worry and concern and conviction that Santa Cruz Island would never, as long as he had any say, be owned by the federal or State government. He was a practicing conservative Republican.  He believed that, as he expressed to me, at any given time, administrations can change in the blink of an election, constituencies change, constituents change, and the future of the land would never be guaranteed. He did not want pavement, he did not want the public, he did not want campgrounds, he did not want mass access to Santa Cruz Island. He considered leaving it to the University of California, but as he said to me, that falls under the governor of the State of California, that can be taken away in the blink of an eye. He didn’t want a State park, he didn’t want a national park, and he stewed for years.  What was he going to do? What was he going to do? It was a burden for him. Enter Channel Islands National Monument and Don Robinson.  And Carey, by the way, was very much a gentleman and always prided himself, took pride in doing the right thing, and he would meet his neighbors, be hospitable, and at some point--I was not there, this was before my time--this was before 1973, presumably, Don Robinson was invited out to the ranch…Don Robinson was invited to the main ranch and he is alleged to have taken a seat in Carey’s chair, which is Carey’s grandfather’s chair--which now is in my back office here, it’s on wheels-- and rolled back and kicked his feet up on the desk and leaned back (the chair leans back), and leaned back the chair with his feet on the desk and said, “Someday this will all be ours.” To which Carey said, “Over my dead body.” So there are many variations on the story, I don’t know which ones you’ve heard, but that’s at least, if not verbatim, the gist of the relationship.

  Timothy: That’s fairly consistent with what I’ve heard. I did come across one, I guess, I don’t know if I should probably just call it a rumor, but some reference to Ed Stanton, Dr. Carey Stanton’s father, expressing an interest in selling the Island to the National Park, and that of course would have been during the Monument time, I wonder if you know anything about that?

  [stopped recording]

  Daily: We’re talking about Ed Stanton, Carey Stanton’s father.  [Reading from some reference]  “At the time of his purchase the winery begun during Caire’s time was all but stopped, Stanton removed the remaining grape stock in the central valley to make room for additional pasturage. In July of 1941, Ed Stanton offered the Island for sale to the United States Army through headquarters of the ninth Corps Area. Stanton received the following response, ‘The commanding general directs me to inform you that in the case, that in case future needs make such a site desirable, appropriate consideration will be given to your property.’ In 1958, five years before Ed Stanton’s death, he then passed the management to Santa Cruz Island to his only surviving son, Carey Stanton.”

  Timothy: So it was an offer to the Army, just about at the beginning of the war?

  Daily: Mmhmm. Ed Stanton died of a heart attack at 435 Windsor, Los Angeles on June 5^th, 1963.

  Timothy: So sometime after this incident with Don Robinson, Carey did sell the Island, or his portion of the island, I should say, to The Nature Conservancy. Could you tell me a little about that and how that transpired?

  Daily: I can, and I was responsible for their meeting, and I’ll tell you how. In 1975, I knew a man named Jake Kittle who was a wealthy rancher who had at that time bequeathed his ranch, Rancho Las Cruces, to The Nature Conservancy. He was on the board of the California Nature Conservancy, and Jake approached me and he said, “We would like to meet Carey Stanton—we, The Nature Conservancy. We’ve done our homework.” And he handed me a document, secret, top secret, confidential, and it was a profile that The Nature Conservancy had done of Carey Stanton. And they had done a thorough job of looking at his wealth, his land holdings, his family situation.  What they didn’t have was an entree to Carey, and I told Jake--Jake and I discussed it--and I said I certainly didn’t keep his calendar, what did they have in mind?  And what ended up transpiring was The Nature Conservancy said they that would send down a representative, happened to be Ken Wiley, from the San Francisco office to give a public presentation at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. And they would like to do that if I could get Carey Stanton to come. So that it would be  sort of an innocuous way of introducing him to The Nature Conservancy with the whole thing being targeted, targeting him. They asked me not to tell him and Jake said it would be better if he didn’t really know, so I didn’t see any need to tell him. I, they did arrange for the slide presentation, Carey did come off the island and he also, at my suggestion, invited Al Vail. So the three of us went to the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and listened to the presentation and afterwards we talked, they talked, and this is what started the discussions after Carey’s having been introduced to The Nature Conservancy by this presentation.  And Carey asked Al Vail what he thought and Al said he wasn’t interested.  And Carey was interested and he wanted to learn more, and he did, and that’s what started the relationship with The Nature Conservancy. They now had been introduced to Carey, Carey met Ken Wiley. The specifics of who, when, contacts, follow-up visits, I don’t really remember, but by 1978, there was lots of talk about forming Channel Islands National Park; legislation was pending. I should also preface this by saying Rick Lagomarsino had a hunting operation with Bill Huffman on Santa Cruz Island, with Carey Stanton being their financial partner, logistical partner, providing the Island for the hunting operation. Rick Lagomarsino’s brother Bob Lagomarsino, was the Congressman who was going to introduce legislation to create Channel Islands National Park. This was all worked out behind closed doors in advance. Carey had his heels in the ground-- his part of the land would not be part of Channel Islands National Park.  The Nature Conservancy was a private alternative to keep his land away from the federal government.  Everybody was in on this before the legislation was passed, naming The Nature Conservancy was an appropriate eventual recipient of Carey Stanton’s holdings. The Nature Conservancy, Carey’s deal with The Nature Conservancy, which I assume you have copies of--we have copies here, the lawsuit, all of the deals--Carey signed in 1978. The deal, basically, was that if The Nature Conservancy could settle with Carey’s nephew, Ed Stanton, who had sued Carey for a partition action, if they could settle with him, then Carey would turn over his two-thirds.  He wanted to do it free of charge.  His lawyer Dick Bergen (by the way, I have an oral history interview transcribed of Dick Bergen, if you’re interested), Dick Bergen said you cannot give this away, Carey.  At the very least you must match what they pay your nephew. Carey used to say his dad used to say to him, “Son, don’t ever bother to pay your lawyer if you’re not going to take his advice.” So, as Dick Bergen says, “You took my advice,” and he did get, I believe it was 1.8 million for his portion of the island, with which estate taxes were paid and other things were paid. So that’s how The Nature Conservancy, they were to get Carey’s portion of the island upon Carey’s death or in 2008, whichever came sooner.  And this was in 1978, so for Carey that was thirty years down the line.  He was a relatively young man in 1978 and he felt very, very good about the arrangement that he made with the Conservancy.  That was all to change two years later. But at the time, he was feeling very celebratory, there was a very famous, in-house-famous, photograph of the Park Service and Nature Conservancy people.  It was a group shot of a lot of people sort of celebrating the signing out around the pool. So Don Robinson wasn’t going to get his wish.

  Timothy: Carey wasn’t interested in making money off this?

  Daily: Absolutely not.

  Timothy: He wanted to remove, I guess, the albatross so to speak.

  Daily: Exactly.  He had been offered, allegedly, in excess of a hundred million dollars for the island, he was not interested. One interesting story that I was involved in, I was sitting in the office one day and Jacques Cousteau called, and he says, “Hello, sir.  This is Jacques Cousteau. I am making a new film and I am rediscovering the world.” And basically Jacques Cousteau was asking Carey for permission to come and film on Santa Cruz Island.  And Carey Stanton, I listened to his response, and he told Jacques Cousteau that while he absolutely admired the work that he had spent his lifetime doing, bringing the world of the oceans into living room televisions around the world, that Santa Cruz Island would not and could not be a part of it, because to allow Santa Cruz Island to be exposed to the masses would only lead to harm and destruction to Santa Cruz Island because people would want to go there, they would want to see it.  They would bring seeds in their shoes, they would put their dogs on the beaches, they’d get angry and drop off a sack of rattlesnakes, they’d light a match and start a fire.  These were all things he used to bring up.  And he said I would be delighted to have you come to lunch on a day of your convenience, we can discuss this further, but you may not film here. And Cousteau said thank-you, but no thank-you.

  Timothy: Very interesting.

  Daily: And the Park Service allowed him to film on Santa Rosa.

  Timothy: So he was very protective of the Island.

  Daily: Absolutely.

  Timothy: Now you said that the relationship with The Nature Conservancy deteriorated or began to deteriorate two years later.  Could you explain?

  Daily: Carey Stanton derived a great portion of his income from the revenue from the Santa Cruz Island Hunt Club and at the end of his life he was bringing in, the Hunt Club was bringing him a revenue of about a quarter of a million dollars a year. Bob Hanson, who by then was with The Nature Conservancy, and whom Carey liked very much--they had a very good relationship--came to Carey one day and said very excitedly that there was a wonderful opportunity for The Nature Conservancy to be able to get funds because the Fleischmann Foundation was dissolving.  It had a dissolution date 25 years after the widow of Max Fleischmann, I believe, and that date had approached, they stood to gain, if my memory serves me, three million dollars or four million dollars, a good chunk of change, but they needed a hook, as Carey explained, to say why they needed the money. And Bob Hanson talked to Carey and said--I dealt with this for years, till Carey’s death--“Let us say that we can manage the sheep, but you have my word as a gentleman, nothing will change, we just need to be able to say something to get that money.” Carey said, “Bob, I trust you, you are a man of your word, I am a man of my word.” They shook hands. Carey said, “I’m happy to help your organization however I can to get these funds.”

  Timothy: And you were present during this time?

  Daily: No, Carey told me this, I was not present. I do have a copy of the one -page amendment that Carey signed. I was present for conversations about this, I was present for, on one occasion, a tearful phone call from Carey to Frank Boren regarding the outcome of this. The bottom line was that The Nature Conservancy exercised its then legal right to control and manage the sheep, which they chose to eliminate. They began shooting the sheep in 1982 when Carey Stanton was overseas. And they brought in helicopters and hunters with repeating rifles and did an aerial assault and some people did an injunction to stop it for awhile, but that is really the straw that broke the camel’s back, that had their relationship never recovered, between Carey Stanton and The Nature Conservancy. The Nature Conservancy would say, “Look, you signed this piece of paper.” Bob Hanson left to go work for the Yosemite Fund; he was no longer there.  Frank Boren, president of the board of The Nature Conservancy, had to take over. Carey asked to be on the board of The Nature Conservancy.  They refused him with the excuse that, you’re a major donor and we can’t have major donors on the board, it’s a conflict of interest. Carey and Frank talked and I was present for the conversation on Carey’s end of it where Frank Boren agreed that with the removal of the sheep, that although the sheep were worth a hundred dollars each, Carey would settle for twenty dollars each.  He was to be paid six hundred thousand dollars by The Nature Conservancy for their removal of the sheep because his income of a quarter of a million dollars had stopped. Frank Boren said, “We’ll pay you.” Frank Boren stopped returning phone calls, Carey wrote letters. Finally, Frank Boren said to Carey, it was relayed to me by Carey, “He’s not a man of his word, he’s not a gentleman, he simply says he wasn’t authorized to tell me what he did. He agrees that he told me, but he didn’t have the authorization to make that statement.” So in Carey’s mind they screwed him. He would repeatedly say, “They’re trying to force me into bankruptcy to get it earlier.” And that was his position when he died.

  Timothy: So he never even received any monetary compensation for the sheep, is that correct?

  Daily: That’s correct and that’s what he was asking for and that’s what Frank Boren agreed to. After the fact that calmed him down because at that point he thought he was going to get twenty dollars a sheep for thirty thousand sheep.  He was going to get six hundred thousand dollars and that calmed him down, but then when the calls stopped being returned and there wasn’t a check in the mail and time passed and time passed and then finally Frank Boren said, “Sorry, I wasn’t authorized to make that agreement.” And they never paid him. And he died despising them.

  Timothy: Now the sheep were running wild at that time or was Carey..?

  Daily: No, they were feral; they had been left to certain portions of the island.  They had been fenced out from cattle areas, they were always getting in but the hunting operation that gave an income Carey saw as a win-win situation because it kept the sheep numbers down, it kept him with an income, and it was a win-win situation. And he had assumed that helping The Nature Conservancy get three million dollars, or whatever it was, was a win-win situation too.

  Timothy: The hunting operation, after The Nature Conservancy’s culling operation began, I assume the hunting operation had to cease?

  Daily: The hunting operation went out of business. There was a lawsuit, a woman fell off a cliff, allegedly on drugs, out at the Christy Ranch out on the cliffs and they sued, the insurance wasn’t renewed. It was sort of a compilation of a lot of things that happened at the same time, but it was, the seed of all of this was The Nature Conservancy’s unwanted intervention into the management of the island sheep.

  Timothy: Okay, so they would have gone out of business approximately 1982?

  Daily: I’d have to look it up.

  Timothy: Okay.

  Daily: Early 80s.

  Timothy: Okay. And Dr. Stanton died in..?

  Daily: December 8, 1987. He was 64, so at that point his holdings passed to The Nature Conservancy. He had formed the Santa Cruz Island Foundation two years earlier with three board members:  himself, myself, and his lawyer, David Watts. And upon his death we had to bring in a replacement for Carey, and we brought in an attorney here in town with Price, Postel & Parma.  His name is Eric Hvoboll. And so it was myself and two lawyers. And then I was made president.  I took Carey’s place as president of the Santa Cruz Island Foundation and it was funded at the point of Carey’s death with his estate.  Before that time, he made an annual contribution to pay my salary, but upon his death the assets of the Foundation were received, which were his personal assets, which is all of this furniture you see, the contents of all the buildings at the main ranch. It was his wish that the Santa Cruz Island Foundation and The Nature Conservancy work together.  The five buildings were to be maintained as he left them, as museums, with his five- and six-figure pieces of furniture in place for Nature Conservancy donors to enjoy. And that furniture, in part, is still there.  We’ve removed some, some is still there.

  Timothy: Okay, okay, the furniture here in this room is all from the main ranch?

  Daily: No, the furniture in this room actually is from his house in, some of it, is from his house on the mainland.  It was his, these chairs were Rococo Revival chairs from his grandparents, all the watered silk stuff, the Victorian stuff was from his grandparents. They had a very large house at 435 Windsor in Los Angeles. And so this Victorian Rococo stuff was all from his grandparents. Some of the things here, the American clock, the grandmother clock in the corner behind you, was Carey’s--that came out of his bedroom on the island, but because it’s a six-figure clock, it’s been removed. The Nature Conservancy gave us an eviction letter within a week of Carey’s death, evicting his possessions from Santa Cruz Island, and we had thirty days to get everything off the island owned by Carey Stanton. So the lawyers got involved, we sat down, we negotiated to get to, just about where we are now, where some of the things have stayed, some of the things have been removed.

  Timothy: I see. Could you tell me a little about the Santa Cruz Island Foundation. It was founded shortly before he died.  What was the purpose of the Foundation?

  Daily: It was set up, in mind, so that it would be a companion organization to The Nature Conservancy, to have these museums on the island.  The mission statement is to be a philanthropic organization with its endowment to continue to support research, researchers, publications that have to do with, not just Santa Cruz Island, but all eight California Channel Islands. So from the time of Carey’s death up until today, that’s what we do is primarily we maintain the furnishings on the island and we do research and we publish books about the cultural histories of all eight Channel Islands.

  Timothy: So your purview is a little bit larger than just Santa Cruz Island?

  Daily: Yes, it’s all eight, it’s all eight islands, and well, all the books on the top shelf, the geological maps, those are all our publications that we’ve done over the last twenty-two years.

  Timothy: Okay. All right, well…

  Daily: So now are you all filled in?

  Timothy: Quite a good background, quite an interesting history. I wanted to ask, if I could, just some, a number of, how should I say, well-publicized incidences that have happened with respect to the Park Service and I’m thinking if we can focus on Santa Cruz Island. I know it’s not a part of Dr. Carey Stanton’s part, but there was the acquisition through condemnation of the Gherini East Santa Cruz Island.  Now I’ve read quite a bit about that, now I wonder if I could get your impression or version of that?

  Daily: You undoubtedly know the ownership history of the east end of Santa Cruz Island, that three of the four Gherini siblings sold out to Channel Islands National Park. Francis Gherini believed that their appraisal was too low, he was not interested in selling, and the Park Service became an unwilling undivided interest holder in the east end of Santa Cruz Island. There was great discord and contention among the Gherini family, primarily between Francis Gherini and his nephew John Gherini.  Have you talked to John Gherini?

  Timothy: I have. I haven’t interviewed him.  I will be interviewing Tom Gherini, his brother.

  Daily: Interesting.

  Timothy: He lives not far from my office in Northern California.

  Daily: I’m of the personal opinion, in studying the family dynamics and knowing the players, I can’t help but think, as is common I’m sure in many families, it got down to an issue of control and power. Francis Gherini, who I knew, I have oral histories of him, interviews, he, I believe, completely understandably, stepped into the role of his older brother, when his older brother Pier died, as the patriarch of the east end of Santa Cruz Island. Pier’s, of Pier’s children, the oldest son was not heir-apparent to the law firm or to this type of business, but the son John Gherini was. And I believe John Gherini felt that he should fill his father’s shoes. And so there was a power struggle, in my opinion, between Francis Gherini and his nephew. And there were frivolous silly fights over five hundred dollars and solar panels and if one liked something, the other one didn’t. I mean it just went on and on and on, this sort of bickering back and forth and ultimately in the end, Francis Gherini ended up getting significantly more for his share of Santa Cruz Island than the other three siblings got. I continue to this day to believe that the Park Service, and this was something I was involved in, erred egregiously and hideously with the descendants of Francis Gherini. I was in a meeting at the Superintendent’s office in San Francisco with Francis Gherini’s daughter Dea, in which, in front of all of us, she was guaranteed that this condemnation action would not preclude her having visitation rights to the east end of Santa Cruz Island, equal to those of her cousin John.

  Timothy: So this must have been prior to the passage of the bill, which…

  Daily: It was pending, it was pending and it wasn’t written into the bill and I can’t remember specifically why we were all in San Francisco, I just…

  Timothy: The regional office would have been there at that time.

  Daily: Well we were at the regional office, but I can’t remember if that was the purpose of our visit or if it was multipurpose.  It was probably more multipurpose, because I know David Watts was there from my board, Joe Walsh, the guitar player, was there, there were a number of people there and Dea was there and we were witness to, and it was a woman, who came in and who was working on, I guess the wording, who absolutely guaranteed that Dea and her siblings would have visitation rights, and in the end she got screwed. And I have always thought that was an egregious error on the part of Channel Islands National Park.

  Timothy: So I have yet to find somebody who can tell me why that, it’s called a reserved right, why that reserved right was not included, because most people, including Representative Andrea Seastrand, who, at least according to her statement, she believed it would be there in the final bill.

  Daily: That’s correct; I can tell you what my opinion is.

  Timothy: I’d like to hear that.

  Daily: Tim Setnicka told me, “I’m going to make damn well sure she gets screwed.” And I said, “Tim, why would you say that?” And he said, “Hah! Francis didn’t sell to us, why should his kids get a reward? Have them talk to their dad.”

  Timothy: So you believe that Superintendent Setnicka had something to do with the…

  Daily: I am positive.

  Timothy: …omission of that reserved right.

  Daily: We are talking about the raid on the east end of Santa Cruz Island in 1997 and I don’t think there’s any secret about the fact that Tim Setnicka orchestrated the raid.  He used it as an opportunity to have Jaret Owens, the man who was running the hunting operations and the recreational operations on the east end of Santa Cruz Island, to get him off of the island. He believed that by getting Jaret off of the island it would give him a firmer hold on the island when legislation was pending.  That was a condemnation of the land that would give the Park Service Francis Gherini’s ownership.  And that was Tim’s way of getting immediate control of the east end of the island. I think that the basis of the raid was entirely bogus, I think that it verges on criminal the fact that the raid happened. I think that it’s just ludicrous to allege that Native American artifacts were being smuggled and stolen and sold. I mean it makes for a very pretty story and a very dramatic story when you start getting the Native Americans involved, etcetera. But I don’t believe there is a whistle of truth.  I know that there is not a whistle of truth in any of it, I know that. I do believe that a guide was chummed with cash to point out human remains. I do believe that Todd Swain, who’s been in this office, paid a guide to show him human remains. I do believe that Todd Swain stood over the guide and said, “Oh, that’s interesting. Hey, I can’t quite see it, hand it to me, would you?”  And I do believe that the guide did pick up the human remains and hand them up to the undercover agent when he was asked to. I do not for a second--I know that no one was selling artifacts, no one was digging artifacts up as any part of a smuggling ring, it was all manufactured from within the park service under the leadership of Tim Setnicka.

  Timothy: And just for the record, Todd Swain was one of the two undercover agents who performed the investigation?

  Daily: Yes. Todd Swain came to my office asking me questions, with someone else.  They’re in our guest book.  I don’t have the other guy’s name, but Todd Swain is really the one who set the whole thing up.  It was just a colossal waste of time and money and emotions and efforts and it was all based on untruths. And to this day I stand by my statement that Ruby Ridge tactics have no place on Santa Cruz Island in a National Park.

  Timothy: Well, I don’t have any more questions about that particular incident, if you want to volunteer or say anything more, I invite you to.

  Daily: Not particularly. Oh, the one thing you should know is that at some point Francis Gherini did donate to the Santa Cruz Island Foundation one percent of his ownership interest in the east end of Santa Cruz Island, whether that was to delay the condemnation or what, I don’t recall now what was behind it.  But after the condemnation had happened and we were left owning one percent, we became willing sellers at the same rate that Francis accepted, ultimately, and we received a check for, it was something just under fifty thousand dollars.

  Timothy: Okay. Yeah, thank you for bringing that up. I was curious about that. I guess I don’t want to keep you for too much longer, but I’d like to ask you about the other islands, Santa Rosa Island and the Vails. You mentioned Al Vail once already in the context of meeting The Nature Conservancy.  When Dr. Carey Stanton and Al Vail went to meet The Nature Conservancy, at that time Al Vail said he wasn’t interested in selling. Ultimately the Vail family, Vail and Vickers, did sell to the Park Service.  There has been a lot of different opinions as to why and how that sale occurred-- sale occurred in 1986. Can I hear your opinion?

  Daily: Sure.

  Timothy: And understanding?

  Daily: Sure. I believe that at the very beginning, although Vail and Vickers, Al Vail in particular, that would not have been his choice, he would not have volunteered to sell. It was not something that he was anxious to do, wanting to do, or willing to do. On the other hand, again my opinion, he was a very, he was a very, very honorable, honest man who believed in his country, and he believed in the United States of America and I know that one of his greatest regrets, he told me on more than one occasion, in his life was that he was not able to fight for his country in the military in World War II because he had asthma. And it was a great source of personal pain to him to have been excluded because he was a flag waving, American-believing, Republican, just a man who loved his country. And when his federal government said, this is what we’re going to do, he said, “Well, okay.” He didn’t fight, he didn’t want to hire lawyers and waste a bunch of money. He did have the respect and the friendship of the local Park superintendent, Bill Ehorn. And he, Al was a man of his word, he did six-figure deals on a handshake and he believed in honesty and integrity.  And Bill Ehorn is a man who is honest and has integrity. And I believe that the federal government let Bill Ehorn down.  There was nothing Bill Ehorn could do and ultimately the Vails ended up with a situation very different than what they expected. And at the time of the sale there was a pot of three million extra dollars, do you know about this?

  Timothy: No I don’t.

  Daily: At the time of the sale, their, what was it that you called, their rights?

  Timothy: Reserved rights.

  Daily: Their reserved rights were set up for twenty-five years and they were to receive twenty-seven million dollars and get a twenty-five year reserved right. And there was some way that the law was written that if they were willing, and I don’t know that the laws and the nuances and the ins and outs of this, but Bill Ehorn advised Al, “Hey, if instead of taking a chunk of twenty-five years, you’re willing to go up for renewal every five years, you get an extra three million dollars, and hell if I were you I’d take it, cause nothing’s going to be any different and you get three more million dollars.” And Al said, “Well, okay. I’ll do that.” So they did the agreement based on five year terms, five of them, rather than one twenty-five year term, Vail and Vickers received an extra three million dollars for doing that and after the, I’m trying to remember if it was after the first five years, the trouble started.

  Timothy: The second, I believe.

  Daily: Okay, I was going to say, I think it was after the second five years, there was what I will call an agitator, very involved, named John Cloud who relentlessly pursued issues of water quality control.

  Timothy: Now who was John Cloud?

  Daily: I have a huge file on John Cloud. John Cloud promoted the ideas of Kate Faulkner.  That’s not to say that they were doing it side by side, but he is what I would call someone with too much time on his hands, who took it upon himself to turn in water quality issues, to go to the, what’s the nonprofit arm-- the something conservation, National Parks…?

  Timothy: The National Parks Conservation Association, the NPCA.

  Daily: Oh, I think they filed a lawsuit, if I am remembering correctly.

  Timothy: They threatened it at first and ultimately they did file it.

  Daily: Mmmhmm. A lot of that was based on what John Cloud was doing. Simultaneous with that Kate Faulkner had become very active within the park, the park then increased its number of biologists to its more than fifty and it became their focus and ultimately Al Vail folded his cards. He wasn’t willing to put six figures into fights, he didn’t want to do that to his family.  He was the managing owner, partner and he folded his cards. And it was a very sad day, and we memorialized it with our book.

  Timothy: Cowboy Island.

  Daily: Cowboy Island.

  Timothy: A beautiful book, I have a copy of it.

  Daily: Does that answer your question?

  Timothy: Yes it does. Would you like to say anything more, or add anything more?

  Daily: I am delighted that you are taking this history. I am delighted that there is an initiative to have this recorded, because a hundred years from now, somebody might care.

  Timothy: I hope so, I certainly hope they do.

  Daily: Well it has been a pleasure talking to you, and I’d be happy to help you in the future, guide you to anything you might need.

  Timothy: Well thank-you, for the record.

 

• Gary Davis

  
  

  Gary E. Davis was a park ranger, environmental steward, and research scientist from 1964 to 2007. This conversation details Gary’s career as a scientist with the National Park Service, the development of the inventory and monitoring program in the National Park Service and at Channel Islands National Park, as well as highlights of his career. Date: June 11, 2007 Interviewer: David Louter

  Date created:

  09/18/2024

  Audio Transcript

  Oral History Interview with

  Gary E. Davis

  June 11, 2007

  David Louter, Interviewer

  Louter:  It is June 11, 2007, with Gary [E.] Davis at Channel Islands, and we’re going to be talking about his career.

  So, you have worked for the National Park Service your whole career?

  Davis:  Yes, I have worked for the Park Service since 1964, but I took two years off to play volleyball for the Army.

  Louter:  I saw that in your vitae.  I was wondering about that.

  Davis:  Yes, I worked, actually, in a diagnostic virology lab at Fort Baker in Sausalito.

  Louter:  So you came to the Park Service in ’64.  Are you from California?  Let’s go back to the beginning.  Where are you from?  Where were you born?

  Davis:  I was born in San Diego, California, in the Naval hospital.

  Louter:  Your dad was a—

  Davis:  He was in the Navy during World War II, which was 1944.  I was born at 11:45 in the evening.  I grew up in San Diego and went to public schools in Ocean Beach and Point Loma, graduated from Point Loma High School in 1962 and went on to San Diego State College.

  Louter:  Today is it San Diego State?

  Davis:  Yes, San Diego State University.  But at that time there were only 7,000 students.  It is now 37,000 students, something like that, one of the largest undergraduate programs in the country.  But then it was just a small local college, four-year school, and they offered a master’s degree, and I did the bachelor’s and master’s in science.

  Louter:  Was there a Ph.D. program at the university at the time?  Because what I’m thinking of is that a lot of degrees, that the master’s was a terminal professional degree.

  Davis:  That’s what it was.

  Louter:  At that time.

  Davis:  San Diego State, at that time, offered through the master’s degree, and they were working out a deal with the University of California at Riverside to do a joint program in ecology, and they were just starting that as I left.

  Louter:  Because I know that in some careers, a master’s degree was rigorous enough and challenging enough that unless you were going to go on to teach, you didn’t actually need the Ph.D.

  Davis:  That was more or less what was going on.  They had a young, ambitious faculty, and they really wanted to be a research institute.  They wanted to be able to offer a Ph.D., so they made their master’s degree look like one.  It was a great experience.  It was a wonderful experience in the mid 1960s.

  Louter:  Were you like a lot of other Navy or military folks who traveled all over the place?

  Davis:  No.  My father just enlisted for World War II.  It was not a career.  He and my mother both grew up in San Diego and went to San Diego High School, so second-generation San Diego, third-generation California.

  Louter:  You were always drawn to the oceans, or how did you come to choose your career or choose, at least, your academic interests?

  Davis:  Sort of by accident, but because of avocation.  Yes, I started playing in the tidepools on Point Loma and at the beach, and I loved to fish.  I went to work on the sport fishing boats, fishing out of San Diego Harbor, out to the Coronado Islands in Mexico, and offshore for albacore.  When I was in junior high school, I started volunteering as a deckhand, working for tips and then actually got a job as a deckhand and then as an assistant captain on fishing boats.  So from ’57 to ’63, I worked in the summers on fishing boats, and that brought lots of questions about the ocean and what was out there and how it worked and who were all these people chasing the fish.

  Louter:  What were the activities on the fishing boats like?

  Davis:  I worked on very small slow boats, so forty-, forty-five-foot boats that went eight or ten knots at most, downhill, downwind, yes.  We’d have fishing parties of fifteen to twenty-five people, and we would leave the dock at two-thirty in the morning, and they would sleep in bunks while we drove them out.  We caught our bait, anchovies and sardines, and then went down to the islands, and at sunrise, around five-thirty, six o’clock in the morning, we’d start fishing.  My job was to make sure the boat was clean and that it operated, the engine ran when it was supposed to, that the bait pumps were working, and they got everything they needed.  We had a captain, a deckhand, and a galley girl who did the cooking, so everybody could have a good time.  So it was early exploration of that interaction with the visitor, taking care of people, answering questions and helping them have a good time, and connect with the fishing.

  Louter:  Literally connecting.

  Davis:  Yes.  In fact, it led to my career in a strange sort of way,  that my first interview with the Park Service was at Cabrillo National Monument.  I applied for a ranger trainee position by accident.

  Louter:  By accident?

  Davis:  I was looking for summer work.  I was tired of working on the fishing boats and thought I needed something that might be career oriented.

  Louter:  So naturally you thought of the National Park Service?

  Davis:  One of my friends from school, yes, in, let’s see, it must have been my sophomore year at San Diego State, he needed to go to the post office to get some kind of a government form, and I went with him.  I was standing around looking at the bulletin board while he was getting the form, and there was a notice about the Federal Service Entrance Exam and how to become a park ranger.  I thought it just looked like—park ranger, to me was summer work.  I had a fifth-grade teacher who was a Yellowstone seasonal ranger, came back and told us tales.  When I did my career development whatever it was in the eighth grade, I chose forestry and did that little piece, had no particular interest in it.  It was just a residual of that fifth-grade teacher.  [laughs]  So I was kind of predisposed to, “Oh, summer work, that would be fun,” instead of going to a fishing boat.

              So that was in the spring sometime.  So in your sophomore year, you’re pretty well prepared for standardized tests, right?  You’ve been taking SATs and all of those different standardized tests.  So I took FSEE and did reasonably well on it, but didn’t hear anything from the Park Service, so I went back to the fishing boats that summer.

              In the fall, in September, I got a letter from the Park Service saying that they were going to hire twelve people the next year, and they wanted to know if I’d go to Cabrillo for an interview.  I went out and met Tom Hartman who was the park ranger at the monument, and he interviewed me.  It was supposed to be an hour interview.  I was there five hours with him.  We had so much fun together.  But one of the questions he asked me was if I had any experience in dealing with the public.  So the sport fishing boats were a perfect segue for me to talk about my interaction with the public.

  Louter:  That’s pretty cool.  On the sport boats, though, I can imagine how that might translate or transfer to being on a research boat later, fishing, but what kind of questions did you have about marine life?

  Davis:  There were a lot of things about why do these fish come here, and why now, and why aren’t they over there?  I mean, the ocean’s flat and blue, but clearly the fish were just in a few places, and those places moved around.  So there were questions about why are they where they are and how do we find them?  So it started out very practical, but it soon became a more general interest than just curiosity about the place.  Then it was there must be a better way of making a living out here than fishing, which turned out to be really, really hard.

  Louter:  And fishing, did they have the same kind of technical technology they have today for finding fish?

  Davis:  No, there were no electronics for finding fish or finding out where you were.  I learned to navigate with a sextant.  I had no GPS, no LORAN.  We had a portable radio on board that you could turn.  It had a directional antenna, and you could turn the radio to find out where the strong station was.  It would help you get back to Point Loma, get back to San Diego, because we were offshore chasing albacore way out of sight of land.  I mean, we’d run six, seven, eight hours offshore and fish for the day and then turn around and come back and try to find our way in.  So, yes, I learned the same technology for navigation that Cabrillo used when he came up the coast.  It hadn’t changed much.  Today the electronics have changed substantially.  We had fathometers, electronic fathometers, to know how deep the water was.  That was the only real electronic thing that we had, but it wasn’t as sophisticated as today’s fish finders or sonar are.  We had none of those kind of things.

  Louter:  I’m curious, still, about the whole fishing.  I guess it’s local knowledge versus scientific knowledge, might be some kind of a way of frame it, than how did fishermen know where the fish were.

  Davis:  Where they had been the previous day and what they had done in the past.  It was, it was traditional knowledge about when and where you go to find the fish, and you follow the birds and you follow the dolphin, so the things that you can see.  You learn to read the waves and the weather and know when the fish are going to bite and when they aren’t.  It’s very hit or miss.  Technology has greatly improved the capacity of the fleet to catch fish.  The increased speed of boats has changed the ability to find the fish, because you can try somewhere, go try somewhere else.  When you’re going eight knots, you have one shot for the day.  You’re going to go there and you’re going to come back.  [laughs]  So you’re a lot more conservative and didn’t have nearly the range that the boats have today for finding fish.  But it was a great introduction to nature and to people, and I was given great responsibility at a very young age, and that was also a great learning experience.  And it did really encourage me to go to university.

  Louter:  So in terms of the chronology, then, you got the interview at the Park Service when you were in college?

  Davis:  Yes, in my sophomore year.  Yes, it must have been the start of my junior year.

  Louter:  Were you already majoring in marine biology?

  Davis:  Actually, no, I started in geology, and that was because of a professor that I met.  When you got to orientation, I just had this interest in science and nature, and I wasn’t sure at all what it was about, so I started in geology based on, really, the personal connection with the professor.  I took general geology and paleontology and some surveying courses.  I learned to survey with compass and a chain too.  So it’s really ancient technology.

              After my freshman year, there were fifty undergraduates in the geology department.  It was one of the largest programs in the country, and twelve seniors graduated and only two of them got jobs.  One of them was Shell Oil, who had to go to Saudi Arabia, and the other one on a Navy hydrographic vessel.  When you grow up in San Diego, getting a job with the Navy isn’t really like getting a job; it’s like if you can’t do anything else, you could always go join the Navy.  So I looked at that, and those were the two best students in the class.  I wasn’t the worst student in the class, but I wasn’t the best, and I thought, “You know, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

              Mineralogy was really a pain.  It was a lot of chemistry and a lot of math, and I said, “I don’t know if I’m going to do really well at this.”  What I really liked was paleontology and I liked the fossils.  What I really liked was their history and the fact that they’d once been alive and the systems that they were in.  I said, “That’s what I like working.”  It fits what I was doing on the fishing boats better.  So I shifted to biology.  It cost me an extra semester, but I changed to biology, and that was a great decision.

  Louter:  So you got your undergrad in biology?

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  Did you have to do any like senior thesis or research papers or anything like that, projects?

  Davis:  No.  I did project reports.  I had an ecology class, did a project on floating spawning boxes for large-mouth bass.  I specialized in ichthyology and then later in marine ecology, but I started out in fresh water because the professor who taught ichthyology was from Cornell.  He was a fresh-water guy.  Again, it was personalities.  It was the people that I connected with.  So ichthyology was really a big thing, and it really fit with the fishing boat experience.

  Louter:  Are any of these professors people that we would know today from their research?

  Davis:  No, I don’t have much of a lineage in that.  Actually, my major professor died when I was in the Virgin Islands.  My thesis was on his desk, and I had to rewrite it all.  That was before we had word processors.  I had the previous draft all marked up, and it had been typed, given to him to circulate and for signature, and it disappeared.  I was 3,500 miles away on an island, and it took me three years to recover, the time that I was in the Army and the year that I was in the Virgin Islands, to put all the pieces back together again.  I had finished everything, left him with the thesis on his desk, and he said, “Oh, yeah, this won’t be any problem at all,” and I took off for the Virgin Islands.  I got a letter six months later that he’d passed away just a few weeks after I last saw him, unexpectedly.  He was a young man, relatively young man.

  Louter:  So the Army came between?

  Davis:  No.  Let’s see.  Chronologically, the short, quick version is that I went to work for the Park Service as a ranger trainee.  It was a career-conditional appointment, subject to furlough.  It wasn’t a seasonal job.  So I showed up.  I got a call.  Let’s see.  I had the interview with Tom Hartman in September, and the following January, February, I got a letter offering me a job at Lassen Volcanic National Park.  The ranger trainee program was started before at the Albright Training Center in Grand Canyon NP.  So the idea was to bring people in in their last two years of undergraduate school, give them an experience for two or three summers in different parks, trying all kinds of different jobs as rangers.  That was the last year of the program that I came in in ’64, and so they opened the Training Center.  But they had this residual just left over, so I just went back to Lassen for several years.

              The first couple of years I was truly in this trainee position, so I’d do a couple of weeks at the entrance station, a couple of weeks on trail crew, and a couple of weeks with fire control and a couple weeks in the campground in campfire programs.  That’s where I began to learn the more formal training about how to communicate, was standing in the campground at Manzanita Lake watching rangers do them for a while, and then they said, “Okay, it’s your turn tonight.”  [laughter]

  Louter:  So, Cabrillo.

  Davis:  So I was doing that, and while I was at Lassen, it occurred to me that if we were going to take care of parks, you couldn’t do it just by protecting the borders.  We needed to understand the parks more.  I was doing diving surveys of the lakes to find out what fish were in them.  Nobody had ever been diving in the lakes.  Some of them were over a hundred feet deep, like Lake Helen.  Yes, there were a bunch of really deep glacial lakes.  So I was diving in those, doing biological surveys.  I thought it might make a good master’s thesis.  It turns out, it wasn’t, but that’s okay.

              But it led me back to graduate school, and when I finished with graduate school, I wrote the Park Service and asked if they had any jobs for a biologist, and my inquiry went to Wally Wallace, who was the chief aquatic guy in Washington at that time.  He wrote back and said, no, they already had six biologists, they didn’t need any more.  That’s one of my favorites.  Wally says, “No.”

  Louter:  Six biologists.

  Davis:  “Six biologists in the whole Park Service, and we don’t need any more.”  That was the best part.  Besides that, you have to pay your dues.  You’ve got to be a GS-3 ranger, a GS-4 ranger, GS-5 ranger.  I said, “Well, I’ve done that part.”  I’d gone through GS-3 to GS-5.  He said so they didn’t have any jobs as biologists, and so I was pretty discouraged.

              But somewhere along the line that letter also got routed to say, “Well, we have an obligation to this person who came through the trainee program.”  An associate regional director from Southeast, Joe Brown—there are two Joe Browns in the Park Service, and Joe Brown in the regional office called me and offered me a job as a campground ranger in the Virgin Islands at Cinnamon Bay.  They had a new campground at Cinnamon Bay.  They needed a new ranger in that position.  So I accepted, just for the adventure of going to something somewhere as exotic as that with a coral reef, and I thought that would really be exciting and a lot of fun.

              Then after I’d said yes, I went and got a book and looked to see whether it was in the Caribbean or in the Pacific.  I didn’t know where it was.  I had no idea what I had just accepted.  [laughs]  It was just an adventure.

  Louter:  So did you end up being a campground ranger?

  Davis:  So I was a campground ranger, but at that time it was called I &RM, interpretation and resource management and law enforcement all rolled into one.  So we did boat patrols.  I was doing some beach erosion studies, learning about coral reefs.  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’d go to Trunk Bay and meet visitors and teach them how to snorkel and introduce them to a coral reef with a lifeguard on a paddleboard.  I taught first aid for the lifeguards.  I did the visitor orientations at Cruz Bay.  When the tour groups would come in, you’d give them ten minutes on this park and what they were going to see for that day.  The challenge was to get that orientation in as quickly as you could by speaking clearly and articulating.  It was a lot of fun.  Most of the rangers hated doing that, and I didn’t mind at all.  It was kind of fun.  And because of my experience in graduate school, I’d learned to write a little bit, not very well, but better than most, and so I ended up writing the park’s first resource management plan because the superintendent learned to rely on people who could write.

  Louter:  Because that’s when the Park Service started developing resource management plans, right?

  Davis:  In the 1960s.  This is 1968.

  Louter:  Because we’re talking post Leopold Report, post Wilderness Act, and then you end up with a lot of management plans for wilderness, resource management.

  Davis:  Right, just doing it for the first time.  Nobody had ever done that before.  The park superintendent was the other Joe Brown in the Virgin Islands, and so the Joe Browns were very good to me, offering me the job and then giving me opportunities to write and then to expand a little bit more than just being the guy sitting in the campground taking care of people.

  Louter:  Did you develop project statements for the—

  Davis:  Yes, I certainly did.  One of the other things I did was haul VIPs around.  People came down to the Virgin Islands frequently, and we wanted to show them the best the parks had to offer.

              Now I’ve completely lost my—

  Louter:  I was just wondering.

  Davis:  Lyndon Johnson’s running mate from Minnesota.  Humphrey.  Hubert Humphrey came down to the park after the ’68 election.  He’d lost.  He stayed in the park at Caneel Bay, and I went with the superintendent to greet him when he came in.  It was almost midnight when he came in off the boat.  Greeted him, and the next morning, I went down to the beach at Cinnamon Bay.  The first thing I did every morning is walk down through the campground to make sure everything was still okay, walked out onto the beach, and there was Hubert Humphrey walking all by himself down the beach.  He was the vice president, and he was walking down the beach all by himself.  He remembered me from the night before, so we walked and talked a little bit at Cinnamon Bay.

              One of the other things they did was say, “Well, we’ve got these guys that are looking for a place to put a habitat on the bottom of the ocean and live in it for a couple of months,” people from the Navy and from NASA and from the Department of Interior, that at that time contained what is now NOAA Fisheries, was the bureau of commercial fisheries in Interior.  They were looking in the Bahamas, at the Dry Tortugas, and off of Puerto Rico, and somebody told them the Virgin Islands were a nice place.  “So take these guys out and show them some places where they might put the habitat in the park.”

  Louter:  What would the habitat look like?

  Davis:  It looks like two beer cans on a cigar box.  On the upper right up there (Davis pointed to a picture of the Tektite habitat on the wall of his office), it was built by General Electric.  They picked one of the places I showed them.  I spent two days taking them around diving and showing them different reefs and different places, and that’s near the University Field Station at Lameshue Bay.  So there was a bit of a support base available.  There was a flat place on the shore where they could build a camp, and what they did was put up a Vietnam War-style MASH unit with all of the quarters and facilities.  They just threw it up as a temporary facility to support this Man in the Sea Project.  So I was the park’s liaison to that because I was there.

              Scott Carpenter was an astronaut and an aquanaut, he was a commander in the Navy, and he was one of the aquanauts on the Tektite Project, is what it was called.  Scott was also supposed to make a dive in California a little later or a little before.  I guess it was a little before the Tektite dive.  It was called Sea Lab.  It was the Navy effort.  They were going out to San Clemente Island.  That’s where they were putting that habitat.  The Navy project kept slipping on its schedule, and pretty soon the Tektite and the Sea Lab dives were scheduled at the same time, and he couldn’t be in both places.  Being a Navy officer, he chose the Navy project.  It’s better for his career.  So it left a gap on the aquanaut team, and the managers of the project invited me because they knew me and I’d already—they said they will pay for a park ranger to come down and take over my responsibilities at the park if they could have me full-time for the Tektite project.

  Louter:  You were obviously an accomplished diver, SCUBA diver by this time?

  Davis:  Yes.  I was a very experienced, very capable recreational diver.  I had not had very much training.  I took one course in San Diego in research diving, and I didn’t really learn that much.  Looking back on it, in particular, now I know how much I didn’t know.  But I was very confident and reasonably capable in the water, and so, yes, we spent a week qualifying with the Navy dive team in D.C. at the experimental dive unit and then came back for another week at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School Hospital in Philadelphia for the pre-dive physical.  So they measured about everything that can be measured on all seven of us.  There were seven people on the aquanaut team.

              So at the end of that project, in fact, in the midst of that mission, I got my draft notice.

  Louter:  Were you actually inside the container?

  Davis:  No, but it was very close to being inside.  But a lot of people had put a lot of energy into training and testing and learning.  I had learned all the systems and the habitat, the environmental control systems, the life support and communications of the research program that we were doing.  We were testing the feasibility of doing research from living under water, being saturated with nitrogen.  We were testing the physiology of saturation with nitrogen.  We were testing the psychology and the group dynamics of working together isolated.  That was NASA’s interest.  They were preparing for space and for Space Lab, for having extended periods of time in space, and so they wanted to check somebody.  Our mission was sixty days.  So they wanted to know what happens.

              The Navy programs didn’t do what they wanted for behavior, because the command structure overrode the natural dynamics of the group, and they wanted some civilians to test and they wanted to test the design of the habitat.  This habitat was designed by G.E. as a Space Lab, but it was modified for use under water, and that’s the origin of the name Tektite. A tektite is this object of unknown origin that comes from space and falls in the ocean.

  Louter:  So you stayed sixty days straight?

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  Obviously in air.

  Davis:  Yes.  You just saturated and you lived in the—the habitat was divided into four rooms, so there’s a wet lab, a storage room, a communications center and the science equipment, and then a quarters.  So there were four rooms to live in.  It was an interesting experience.

              I got my draft notice, and the Park Service said, “Well, he’s dispensable.  Goodbye.  It was nice knowing you.”  [laughs]  The Navy admiral, who was in charge of the project at this point, picked up the phone and got me a deferment for sixty days so that we could finish the mission and get it done.  But that’s how I ended up in the Army.  I’d gone for my pre-induction physical in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and I had to ask for the forms in English because everything they gave us was in Spanish, not surprisingly.  And I said, “I don’t think I want to go into the Army in Puerto Rico and leave my wife on the island without housing with the Park Service.”  So we argued that my home was in San Diego and the Park Service should move me back to San Diego, and we had quite a tussle about that, but eventually we prevailed and the Park Service moved us back to San Diego.  So I entered the army from San Diego and went to Ford Ord.  Out of a company of 298 guys, 296 went to Vietnam in the infantry, and I went to Fort Baker to this medical lab.

  Louter:  Which is in Golden Gate today?

  Davis:  Yes, it is.  It’s part of the recreation area, yes.

  Louter:  How did they single you out for the marine lab?

  Davis:  Because of the work that I did on Tektite.  When you go through basic training, there’s one stop that is a kind of a “What are you going to do in the Army career?” kind of thing.  Even if you’re only there for two years, what’s this person good for.  The guy who did that interview was a recreational diver around Monterey.  He was living in Monterey.  So he said, “Well, what have you been doing in the last whatever?”  Well, I was just full of these stories of Tektite.  I’d been on the lecture circuit telling people about the project, and so I gave him my best five-minute shot, and he was just fascinated.  Well, I talked to him for an hour.  His dive partner was the captain who was in charge of the interview, so he said, “The captain’s got to hear this.”

              So we went and spent another hour with the captain.  It was supposed to be a ten-minute interview, right?  So two and a half hours later, the company has gone somewhere else on base, and they said, “Oh, you’ve got to decide what you want to do when you’re in the Army.  What do you want to do?”  Everybody else, you answered the question or they told you what you were going to do.

              I said, “What are the choices?”  They gave me a binder and said, “Here are all the jobs.  Pick one.”

              I quickly went through it and came to this thing that said biological laboratory assistant.  I said, “That sounds safe.”  [laughs]  And I picked it.

              It turns out there were just about fifty-four of those positions in the U.S. Army, and they were assigned in only three places: either at Walter Reed in Washington, D.C.; the Fifth Army Medical Lab in St. Louis, Missouri; or in the Sixth Army Medical Lab in Sausalito.  I had no idea when I made that choice.  So when the assignments came down at the end of our eight weeks of training, I was assigned to the Sixth Army Medical Lab in Fort Baker.

  Louter:  That’s amazing.

  Davis:  It is.  It is absolutely amazing.

  Louter:  Did you ever find out how many of those guys came back from Vietnam?

  Davis:  No, but there are several names on the [Vietnam Veterans Memorial] Wall.  But I don’t know how many came back.

  Louter:  That’s very sobering.

  Davis:  Yes, it is.

  Louter:  It’s amazing, though.

  Davis:  Yes.  So, yes, a couple years in Sausalito, which was an interesting experience in ’69 and ’70.

  Louter:  What kind of work did they have you do?  Was that the virology?

  Davis:  Yes, that was the virology piece.  I went in.  They said, “You’re going to work in the virology lab.”

              I said, “Great,” and I went home and got a book and said, “What the hell are viruses?”  Well, they’re smaller than bacteria, but they really don’t live on their own.  I thought, “Ah, this is going to be interesting.”

              But I learned what I needed to know to run the diagnostic section, which is we got samples from hospitals all over the Pacific and the twelve western states, came into our lab, and I worked as an assistant in that section for about two months, and then that guy moved on.  He was a Ph.D. entomologist from Clemson University, and he wanted to work in the entomology section.  There were fifty-some enlisted people.  Everybody had graduate degrees in biology of various kinds, a veterinary medicine section, a pathology section, a bacteriology section, and our virology piece.

              I ended up being the guy in charge after a year.  I was in charge of the virology section.  There was a colonel who was actually in charge, but I was in charge of the enlisted folks, and he had a major working for him.  The colonel was a legend in virology.  His name was Al Leibowitz, and he has procedures and techniques and all kinds of things named after him.  The fluid they use to culture viruses in the lab is called L15.  It was his fifteenth formulation, the Leibowitz 15.  He was a great guy, and I learned a great deal from him in the virology business and how to do all that stuff.

  Louter:  I would think, working in a lab?

  Davis:  Yes, never worked in a lab before, so it was really fascinating experience.  I learned a lot.  I wrote a manual on how to do the diagnostic piece.  They’d never written it down.  It was just an oral tradition passed on from one guy to the next.  I said, “This is nuts.”  [laughs]  So I crafted a handbook for the army on diagnostic virology.  But the colonel was really competitive with the other officers in the headquarters unit.  It was very civilized.  I broke my wrist playing football, that didn’t work out real well, in the first or second week I was there.  I thought they were going to ship me out, so I was really worried.  I couldn’t run the pipette with a broken hand.  But he liked to play volleyball.  He had a golf team and a bowling team.  So I played volleyball.  I’d learned to play volleyball in San Diego, so that was my sport.  We won Army championships and I traveled all around playing volleyball for the Army, had a great time.

              But when all that came to an end, I got a call from the superintendent at Everglades, was Joe Brown, the guy who had been the superintendent at Virgin Islands.  He’d had a fight with the chief scientist in Washington about who was going to hire a biologist, where there was a conflict between superintendents trying to hire scientists and a centralized program run out of Washington, DC.  Bob Linn was the chief scientist, and they’d had a meeting at Flamingo, and Joe came away from that meeting saying, “Well, Bob’s going to hire a biologist, but I won’t be able to control what he does, and that’s unacceptable.”  So he crafted a position for Biscayne National Park with money from Everglades and called me and said, “I need a marine biologist.  Will you come work for me?  I know you’re getting out of the Army.”

              I said, “Yes, I will.”

  Louter:  Was this when you’d finished up your thesis that had been lost?

  Davis:  Yes.  Yes, I spent the two years I was in the Army in San Francisco commuting to San Diego to reconstitute the committee.  Yes, it was an interesting experience of learning the bureaucracy of universities and the politics of the interaction of the various players, the various professors.  I mean, when you’re a beginning student, the faculty’s all up here and they must be all part of the same family and they get along.  Nah.  [laughs]  You find out all these little petty jealousies and things.

              Oh, they just hated this.  They wanted me to start all over again.  My professor was gone.  He had protected me.  He had allowed me to do the kind of project that he thought was good, but these new young ecologists said, “Oh, no, that’s not at all adequate.  You need to start all over again.”  And I had a year’s worth of fieldwork.  I’d done a multiple stepwise regression of the factors that you measure in lakes to estimate their primary productivity, and I compared those estimates, those models, with actual measurements of Carbon 14 uptake in the lake.  So I had twice-a-week samples for a year from multiple depths at multiple locations in this reservoir in San Diego County, and I’d worked all through that.

              Computers at that time were in big buildings, and you put cards in readers, and I had put a lot of data in that machine and done this really cutting-edge analysis for the time that now you could do in a spreadsheet.  But at the time, it was a big deal, and I wasn’t about to go back and redo that.  So I spent the better part of the year and a half convincing these folks that that was a really good study and it would be good for them to have it on their list.  And got that done in—let’s see.  I must have finished that up in March or April and then left at the end of May to go to South Florida.

  Louter:  Had ecological theories changed that much since you started your graduate work?

  Davis:  We’ve learned a lot more and we have a lot more powerful analytical tools, but the basic findings didn’t change all that much.  What we discovered was that I could build a model for that reservoir that would allow me to measure from plankton diversity from chemical, physical measurements, temperature at different depths and alkalinity and a whole bunch of those things that you can measure in the water quality.  I could predict the productivity of the lake accurately in that reservoir, but I couldn’t take that formula to the next reservoir in the same watershed and make the same prediction, so there was that much variation.

  Louter:  Interesting.

  Davis:  Yes.  What we were looking for was a model you could generalize.  So another student had done another reservoir, I did one, and we compared them.

  Louter:  Is this aquatic ecology?

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  Now, in terms of where ecology was and all its various specialties, let’s say wildlife ecology, aquatic ecology, whatever the other ones would be called, where was aquatic ecology in terms of this development?

  Davis:  Well, it’s one of the older.  Ecology came from limnology, and that’s actually what it probably would have been called in the 1950s was limnology.  But ecology was on the rise, and, you’re right, people were dividing up forest and deserts and just adding ecology, Arctic ecology, yes.  So it was, yes, labeled aquatic ecology, but we were looking at the whole system.

              But that’s the tradition that came from limnology, was to look at physical, chemical, environmental things.  The plants and the animals and wildlife and people were all part of these systems.  Because they were at a human scale, I think, looking at lakes and ponds and even streams and rivers, you could see the whole thing.  When you get to an ocean, it’s hard to include people in that and hard to see all the pieces.  But the tradition in aquatic sciences is to be much broader and inclusive, whereas in the forest you’ve got people who do birds, people who do trees, people who do bushes, people who do bears.  We really get into very narrow specialties and it’s harder to integrate.  One of the things that drew me to aquatic systems was this look at the whole system.

  Louter:  As I recall, I think it was the early aquatic ecology, the theory of balance, right, that the lake [unclear]?

  Davis:  Yes, that there’s a balance and it comes to a tipping point and all changes, that there are laws of the minimum, that there are limiting factors.  Everything else may be good to go for very high productivity, but if you don’t have enough nitrogen, then nothing happens, and so there were those kinds of concepts around, but not very well tested, not very well measured, and that’s what has gotten better.  We’re much better at measuring things, and it’s only within the last five or six years that we’ve had the capacity to do that kind of synoptic review of oceans because of satellite coverage and because of the sensors that allow us to look at very broad scales of plankton distribution and fish distributions so we can begin to correlate all those pieces.  So the things that we were able to do in the sixties in lakes have only come to us through the technology now in the early twenty-first century.

  Louter:  I don’t have my ecological history down very well, but when you were talking about that, I was thinking about the Odoms and the work that they did in changing the path of the systems.

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  Were they doing that before or after this work?

  Davis:  I was using some of their early textbooks, early things that I had in my training, and it was a lot of fun to work with them in Florida when I went to Everglades.

  Louter:  Because they were there, right?

  Davis:  Yes.  Tom had just done a piece on Everglades, one of his early spaghetti diagrams of South Florida, and he went with me, or I went with him, to the Dry Tortugas, and I remember learning how he looked at whole systems.  We stood on the dock at Fort Jefferson and looked out at the coral reef system, and he says, “Well, what drives this system?”  I thought, well, that’s a pretty basic question.  But the discussion evolved from there into many more specific things, that you began to learn how to look at whole systems and the interactions and what is the most important stuff and what’s the trivial stuff.  So, yes, there were some good lessons.

  Louter:  Interesting.  Hopefully, we can learn more about the Odoms, because I remember radionucleides and that sort of controversial idea of testing.

  Davis:  Oh, yes, tracing this stuff through and looking at energy flow.  One of his ideas was you could reduce everything in the system into energy, and then you looked at how many kilocalories were stored in the mangroves.  We had proposals at Everglades.  He wanted to come in and clear cut twenty-five-meter quadrants, twenty-five meters on a side, just cut everything out and weigh it all.  We obviously didn’t approve that, although hurricanes do more damage than that.  But he did those kinds of study just to find out how much energy is stored in the biomass.  Yes, it was a very interesting way of looking at systems, and it was one of the things, when we started looking at what are you going to monitor, how are you going to decide what few things you want, or do you want to measure the energetics, and it’s just too hard and we don’t know enough about the system to be predictive about the results.

              Now that I know this, what do I know?  And it wasn’t enough for managers to make decisions, but it was really basic to our understanding of how ecosystems function.  So we needed both and you could tease apart what managers needed to know to make decisions by taking [unclear] from what scientists needed to know to figure out how systems function.

  Louter:  I find that fascinating, and I’ll ask you more, I’m sure.  You said you got the job at Everglades or Biscayne—

  Davis:  Everglades.  There was a position at Biscayne, and they had the money at Everglades.  Biscayne was a brand-new park, and the superintendent at Everglades supervised Biscayne at that time, and Dry Tortugas.  They still manage Dry Tortugas as part of the Everglades unit.

  Louter:  It reminded me when you said he could only hire one.

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  Well, that’s the interesting part of your career that is a great example of the development of the science program in the sixties following the Leopold Report and actually the Robbins Report.

  Davis:  Yes.  I thought Robbins was more important.

  Louter:  Yes, and it doesn’t get as much coverage.  I remember Leopold and vignettes of primitive America and those eloquent statements.

  Davis:  Those were the bullets they were trying to teach you.

  Louter:  That’s right.  Those were the bullets.  [laughter]

  Davis:  That’s what people remember, that’s right.

  Louter:  But there should be a chief scientist in Washington and then there should be scientists who are sort of removed from the park level.

  Davis:  That’s right.  Independent of park management’s influence.  That’s right.

  Louter:  So your selection sounds like it was based on—

  Davis:  I was what we called a management biologist, as opposed to research biologist.

  Louter:  Interesting.

  Davis:  Yes.  Funny part of that story is I was in Sausalito, Joe Brown calls, offers me the job, I said yes.  I have not a piece of paper, but I was getting out of the Army and I told the Army—I’d kept my home of record was in the Virgin Islands, because that’s where I’d come from.  I figured I could move anywhere if the Army would move me back to that home of record.  So anywhere’s going to be closer than the Virgin Islands, and so when he said, “Yes, come to South Florida,” I told the Army, “Send all my stuff to Homestead.”  But I didn’t have a job.  I just had a phone call from the superintendent.

              So we drove across country, found Joe’s house, superintendent’s quarters at Pine Island in Everglades, went up, knocked on the door, and he says, “What are you doing here?”  He was glad to see us, but, “What are you doing here?”  Turns out he’d had that conversation with me in the morning, and that afternoon was taking some VIPs around out of Flamingo.  He was driving a Boston whaler and somebody had dropped a Coke can, and he’d bent over to pick it up and turned the boat at full speed and ran it up into the mangroves.  It put a mangrove branch that big around through the hull of the Boston whaler and threw them out and sent them all to the hospital.  Joe didn’t remember having talked to me, oh, two months later.  [laughs]

  Louter:  Did you remind him?

  Davis:  Yes, I did.  Standing on his doorstep, I said, “You offered me a job and I accepted it.”

              He says, “I did?”  [laughs]  And he made it work.

              When I got there, there were two research scientists on the park staff and one management biologist, and I made the second management biologist.  So that was four scientists working at Everglades.  When I left, there were fifty-two research scientists and there were forty-eight management biologists nine years later, ten years later.  So that was the beginning of growth of science in the Park Service.

  Louter:  That was mostly through the seventies?

  Davis:  Yes.  I went there in ’71 and left in ’80.

  Louter:  Should we—

  Davis:  Sure.

  [Begin File 2]

  Louter:  So, we left off—I think you probably already mentioned it, but to recap, when you were hired at Everglades, the superintendent who hired you forgot you were coming.

  Davis:  Right.  Forgot he’d hired a scientist.  [laughs]

  Louter:  Forgot that he hired you, and that part of your hiring was also reflected in the organization of the science program in Washington at the time.

  Davis:  That’s right.

  Louter:  —which we had the Robbins Report, and the idea was to have a chief scientist in Washington who would have research scientists in the parks?

  Davis:  Yes, who worked for the chief scientist in Washington, so we had people in various disciplines out in the parks.  Bob Linn, at that time, was the chief scientist in Washington.

  Louter:  The first one?

  Davis:  No.

  Louter:  The second one?

  Davis:  He was second.  Well, actually, he was the third because Starker Leopold went back and did it on temporary basis.

  Louter:  He was the assistant.

  Davis:  Right.  That’s right.  Then there was one other person that had come from the naturalist side.  That’s what naturalists in parks used to be.  They used to be natural scientists, not interpreters or educators, but the nineteenth-century term for a biologist was a naturalist.  That’s what we had in the parks.

              Bob Linn was probably the first, you might say, modern chief scientist of the Park Service, and he was trying to figure out how to develop a program, and he brought in about a dozen young people new to the Park Service, most of them with Ph.D.’s, and gave them specialties in forestry or aquatic sciences.  So he was just trying to figure out how to build that program and make it effective and had come to the conclusion that those scientists needed to be in parks, not in Washington, D.C., that the ones that were in D.C., we had some of those people were in Washington, D.C., and those people were kept so busy on the administrative trivia and on putting out the fires from Capitol Hill and from Department of Interior, and the things that go on in Washington office completely absorbed them, and the more people he added, the more work there was to do.  He knew that if they were going to really address the issues identified in the Robbins and Leopold Reports, that he needed to get people in parks.

              There were a few scientists in a few parks that had seen the need for that.  Bill Robertson down at Everglades had been there since the early 1950s, 1952 or ‘53, and he is one of the foundations of fire ecology in the world, let alone in the Park Service, and he’d been in place in the park but working for the Washington office for a long time.  There were others at Yellowstone and Great Smoky Mountains, and those people were successful in building on that model.  Bob Linn wanted to add to that program, but he was in competition with park superintendents who also felt that need for science and to be better competitors with the Corps of Engineers in South Florida, for example, or the Water Management District.

              Those people all had specialists.  They had engineers and ecologists and water-quality specialists on their staffs, and the superintendent couldn’t begin to compete with them when he was trying to explain why the park needed more water of a certain quality at a certain time delivered in these places in this way.  He needed technical expertise.  So the Park Service was trying to figure out how they were going to provide those services to the superintendents, and that’s what was going on in South Florida.

  Louter:  Under that model, would the chief scientist in Washington have directed the scientists stationed in the parks to do other work, other than what the park needed?

  Davis:  Yes.  That was the fear of the superintendents.  That was the disconnect, was that the chief scientist in Washington might say, “Well, you know, what we need to know is what drives the energy in the Everglades ecosystem.  We need to know what are the major drivers and stressors of this system.”  And the park superintendent wants to know, “Should I mow the margins of the road?  Should I fertilize?  Because visitors like to see green grass at the edge of the road, and it’s a safety issue if I keep it down low.  How much fertilizer should I apply?”  That literally was one of the issues going on in the Everglades.  The superintendent wanted Bill Robertson, rather than looking at the role of fire in the Everglades system or in the pine forest, was to give him recommendations about fertilizing the shoulders of the road and recommend how often it ought to be mowed to keep the bushes from intruding.

              And you can see there, if you paint the picture right, you can really see the contrast between this chief scientist in Washington who looks at fundamental ecological processes and nature and what we have to do to perpetuate it, and the park superintendent, who’s just trying to keep the restrooms clean, the roads free of potholes, and take care of visitors as they come and go.  In all of that, of course, there’s this transition from what are parks all about and nature becoming rarer and rarer and more and more isolated, and is it possible to even sustain an Everglades ecosystem in the part of the landscape that is in the park, or do we have to have some kind of interface with the Water Management District and the Corps of Engineers and agriculture and urban development upstream?

              Well, the answer clearly at this point is you’ve got to do it altogether.  But at that time, the Corps drew a line across the north boundary of the park and put in a levee and cut off the flow of water into the park.  Now, we’ve still got a million and a half acres of the coast, but it’s insufficient without the water coming from the north.  Then they cut four holes in the dike and put in control structures that they could open and close and allow little bits of water to come through at various times, and that was the engineering solution to providing water to the park after the park complained and sued the Corps for that change.  That was in 1962.

  Louter:  So it was the Corps that put the—

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  [unclear]?

  Davis:  Well, as Marjorie Stoneman Douglas told audiences everywhere that would listen to her, “Don’t criticize the Corps.  They only do what they’re told.  They’re a fine bunch of young men.  They are great engineers.  You just have to be careful what you ask them to do.”  And South Florida had asked them to prevent floods during hurricanes and to provide a steady supply of water for agriculture and for the city of Miami.  The park and nature were not on the list.  It needed to be put on the list, was her point.  But in the process of trying to compete for the water, our people would vilify the Corps for having built the levee and put in these S-12 structures, the control structures.  We didn’t understand enough about the system.

              So, first of all, we said, “Well, we need to get water back.”  Bill Robertson was there to explain what kind of water had been there and what role it played in the natural history of wading birds and alligators and sawgrass and how fire was related to that, and it was water and fire in the biology and how all those things mixed, as he could understand it in the 1950s and early in the 1960s.  His science was strong enough to convince everybody, well, we had to put holes in the dike and at least put in those four points to allow water in.  We could argue that historically the park had always had a certain amount of water.  We could get enough information to estimate some minimum amount of water that was required.  In wet years when you had flood discharges because you had too much water and threatened the cities and fields with flooding, you could have more.  But there was some minimum level that the park had to get all the time, based on historical information that Bill was able to provide.

  Louter:  So he did that, gathering information, making recommendations?

  Davis:  Right.

  Louter:  But was a lot of it after the fact?  I mean after they put the—

  Davis:  Oh, yes, the levee was already up.

  Louter:  —levees up and then it’s like, “Okay.”

  Davis:  “Okay, now what do we do?”  And what came later was, “Well, it’s still not working.”  With what little information that Bill and one other scientist had gathered, it looked like wading bird populations were still on the decline, alligators were on the decline, fishes.  The whole system was starting to unravel in various ways.  Invasive species were moving in from the edges.  We needed to know more about how the system worked so that we could improve on the water delivery system.  That’s why we eventually developed the research program that we did in the seventies when I was there, because we needed a better understanding that you couldn’t replace sheet flow that came in pulses down the system with this average trickle that came through these four holes in the dike, that you needed to spread it over a large area, you needed to have draw-down periods that were timed with the rest of nature so that the birds could get food to feed their young, and they built their nests at levels and at times based on the rate at which water was drying up in the Everglades.  If you changed that by your manipulation of the system and through the structures, they got all out of whack, and they couldn’t feed their young or they didn’t have enough to feed their young.

              So you needed to have the right quantity of water, the right quality of water.  You couldn’t put a lot of nutrients in it because you over-fertilized the sugar cane fields or the tomatoes.  It had to come in pulses.  If you just went with an average flow all the time, that didn’t work.  You had to flush things out.  You had to draw it down to concentrate the foods so the wading birds could go to it, the alligators could get to it, at a critical time in their life cycle during reproduction.

              So working out all those things is why we needed a lot more research in hydrology, in plant ecology, in animal ecology, and in the coastal systems, because a lot of Florida’s economy at that time was based on shrimp fishing and on lobster and on stone crabs and snappers and groupers and lots of other things that all use the estuaries, the coastal zone of the park.  Half of Everglades is in saltwater, and that was a nursery area for the offshore fishery, and that was all being destroyed.  So landings were going down.  All kinds of bad things were happening as a result of that.  So we needed all that expertise to make all that work.  So that’s why we built the program.

              I forgot why we started down that road.

  Louter:  We can go back at some point in time about the whole Florida research.  What was the group called?

  Davis:  Well, when I was there, it was called the South Florida Research Center.

  Louter:  But we could talk more about that, but what I find interesting is that in terms of the pattern in the Park Service at the time—I’m all about patterns—was to start establishing not just research scientists in the parks, but also didn’t the CPSUs or that idea of research centers emerge about the same time?

  Davis:  About the same time Don Field was establishing a Cooperative Parks Study Unit (CPSU)  in Seattle.  That was the first one.  But the idea was the same thing, and it wasn’t a matter of we need to establish a research position in the park or have a better connection with the research committee through the university; it was solving problems for superintendents so they could compete more effectively with the other consumers of natural resources.  It was an awareness finally building that the park boundaries were permeable and that there was an exchange of material, of migratory species, of water coming and going in and out of parks, and the parks depended on that.  We needed to understand parks.

              It’s kind of what I thought I had learned or seen at Lassen that took me back to graduate school, is that you couldn’t just protect by the park by building walls around it high enough and strong enough and then manning the walls and keeping the deer poachers out.  That wasn’t sufficient.  There was, in 1962, a Columbus Day storm in Lassen that blew down a bunch of red fir.  I mean, it was almost like tornadoes had gone through the forest and thrown them all over.  The first reaction was to go in and log it all, salvage it.  There was a big discussion about whether or not that should happen or not.  Somebody had the wisdom to say, “No, it’s part of the system, and it needs to stay there.  That energy needs to be there.  That’s how these forests develop.”

              Well, in 1962 and ‘63, that was right at the time of the Leopold and Robbins reports, people were just starting to think about those kinds of things, and that was one of my first introductions to professional National Park Service activities. I was trying to interpret to the public why those trees were still laying on the ground rotting.  It was that kind of understanding and the lake surveys that I was doing that made me begin to question whether or not just protecting the places was going to be sufficient, and that’s what was emerging in South Florida at the same time.

  Louter:  There’s so much that’s going in the sixties and early seventies time period.  This obviously is about some general stages of your career, but it’s also the time when ecosystem management is appearing.  You see it in some of the reports you talked about helping to author, with the first resource management plan.  Was that something that was on people’s minds as well?

  Davis:  It was.  It’s one of the things that drew me to the Park Service.  I mean, after I was there.  I told you I got there by accident.

  Louter:  Yes.

  Davis:  When I showed up at Lassen Volcanic National Park, one of the first things they gave me—it was a district ranger named Bill Clemons at Park Headquarters, gave me the Robbins Report to read.  He said, “Here, this just came in.  Tell me what’s in it that I need to know.”  Classic.  Oh, man, I thought what a great place this is.  They practice ecosystem management, I was just learning about ecosystems, just taken a course in ecology.  It was a very exciting time, and, from my perspective, that’s what parks were all about, was ecosystems.  It had never occurred to me it was about other things, not that there was any conflict between visitor use and wildlife and all that stuff that went on in the twenties and thirties with George Wright and his crew.  When I was starting with the Park Service, my introduction was the Robbins and Leopold reports.

  Louter:  I hadn’t thought about that.  That really sheds light on a lot of different things, but I think the Leopold, Robbins reports are a good anchor for the conversation now.  Was ecosystem management being practiced?  Was it just all fresh?

  Davis:  No, it was fresh, just getting started.

  Louter:  Figure it out?

  Davis:  People were just starting to figure it out, that’s right.  We were still going in and treating trees, doing fungal control of ribes for blister rust, and beetles were still a big problem.  Boy, they were cutting down the trees and ripping the bark off and spraying oil.  They were trying to kill the pests.  So we were still doing that.  We were still managing fisheries in traditional species-based ways.  We were still planting fish in lakes for people to catch.  And that was one of the things I loved, it  was a great part of the job.  We’d throw those five-gallon water packs on our backs and walk ten miles into a lake somewhere and dump these fish in and then go back out.  I’m going, “How come I’m doing this?”  [laughs]  And who knows what’s in there.  Nobody ever went back to look.  That’s what got me to looking at streams.  So I was snorkeling down the streams and finding them full of brook trout (invasive species from eastern U.S.), and we were putting hatchery-reared little fingerling rainbow trout in, and the brook trout were just eating them.  Nobody ever caught any rainbow trout, but we just kept planting them.  It’s kind of, “Is anybody thinking about this?”  [laughs]  Yes, I was there to go figure it out, but the guidance was there in those reports.  But people had day jobs, and if the day job was eliminating forest pests and putting out fire as fast as you can, you don’t stop and think about those things.

  Louter:  So was it ecosystem management that was going on at Everglades, or was it more science to support?

  David:  No.  It was ecosystem management.  That’s what Bill Robertson brought to the table, the same thing that George Wright brought to parks in the twenties and thirties.  It was a look at the whole system and the role of fire.  That was Bill’s entrée, was fire, but that led him to look very broadly at ecology and ecosystem management.  Not species.  We’re not just trying to protect bald eagles or wood storks.  This is about the Everglades ecosystem in its broadest context, and that’s what leaving the trees that were downed at Lassen was about.  It was understanding the role of downed material in forests.

              At Lassen, there was no resource manager.  There was a forester, closest thing to professional scientist.  Somebody with a bachelor’s degree in forestry, who is a ranger, became a superintendent.

  Louter:  As I recall, I think the foresters were the first scientists.

  Davis:  They were especially in the Pacific Northwest in the big forested parks, yes, in coastal parks.  There wasn’t any equivalent to that.

  Louter:  Yes, because I also recall one of the products of those reports was that we would have scientific-based management decisions.

  Davis:  Yes, science was introduced into the lexicon, and we’re still not sure what it is, even when we went through, what, eight years ago, as we were discussing, actually, the launch of the Natural Resources Challenge, that NLC [National Leadership Council ] went through and made a list of the guiding principles of the Park Service, and science wasn’t on the list, even with Mike  Soukup at the table.  It got missed somehow.  I think that, in part, Mike just didn’t think that whole exercise was worth spending a whole lot of time on.  But when it came out, I looked at that and said, “Mike, how come science isn’t one of the guiding principles of the agency?”  It was a terrible oversight, and they completely missed it.

              But here we are, thirty years later, we’re still missing it.  In fact, one could make the argument that those reports issued in the early sixties really weren’t taken seriously and acted upon for thirty years by NPS leaders.  It wasn’t until the mid nineties when we really launched a serious effort to put scientists in parks, and it was only after the loss of a lot of the scientists in the parks to the NBS [National Biological Survey], that we actually began to say, “Well, you know what?  Nobody’s going to do this for us.  It’s the mission of the Park Service that requires we have a scientific basis for what we do.”

  Louter:  Yes.  There’s a lot there.  I like that.

  Davis:  Well, I don’t know very many of the details, but apparently that’s a similar thing that happened after George Wright’s passing in 1935.  In 1940, when what biologists there were in the parks went to the Fish and Wildlife Service.  In the early sixties, when I was asking after, “Well, who does the research?  Who do I talk to about this?” I was directed to the Fish and Wildlife Service.  They said, “Oh, yeah, they’re still the official agency of record for doing research, biological research in the parks.”  Except at Yellowstone, where there were people specifically assigned to the park, research for parks from the Fish & Wildlife Service just wasn’t available and it wasn’t happening, wasn’t there.

  Louter:  The predecessor to the Fish and Wildlife was U.S.—we called it the U.S. Biological Survey, but before that it was the Biological Survey.

  Davis:  That’s right.  There was a Biological Survey, that’s right, and that’s what was created in the 1940s.

  Louter:  Yes, it was people like, well, a variety of folks, but you had George Wright.  He was a member.  But there were scientists like the Murrys.

  Davis:  Before the Biological Survey there were the Murrys, yes.  That’s right.

  Louter:  Interesting.

  Davis:  Yes, and they produced Fauna 1 and Fauna 2, yes.

  Louter:  Yes, and you had your connection with Grinnell at Berkeley.

  Davis:  Yes, at Berkeley, that’s right.

  Louter:  And parks like Yosemite.

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  Okay.  That’s the  time when George Wright was killed.

  Davis:  That’s right, yes, and then science in the Park Service went away and it showed  the importance of one person, George Wright, and the whole thing just kind of folded, and then people were moved into another part of the larger organization and lost sight of parks, largely.  The war intruded, and it wasn’t until sometime in the fifties when people started to figure out things were going south on them.

  Louter:  And the ecological movement in general society kind of raises the awareness.

  Davis:  Precisely.  A number of events occurred and the effects of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill are still here, right?

  Louter:  Yes, [unclear].

  Davis:  The jetport that was being built upstream from Everglades, huge regional airport that was in the Big Cypress and in the Everglades drainage, that galvanized that community.  What was the event in Puget Sound?  There was a big thing that went on that I just heard this last week that people were talking about, that people in Puget Sound and the Juan Islands were convinced the environmental movement started there.  It’s the first time that I’d heard that, but seems logical.  It was not one event.  It was a general understanding of ecosystems and ecology and a few of these events that galvanized communities around the country to say, “Wait a minute.  We want to do things differently.”  Gaylord Nelson and Earth Day and all that came a little bit later.  He was a frequent visitor at Everglades.

  Louter:  Was there a history of research or administrative history of the Everglades that’s been under production the last few years?

  Davis:  I haven’t seen it.

  Louter:  I’ll see if I can get a copy.

  Davis:  Yes, I’d like to see that.

  Louter:  So ’71 to ’80-ish.

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  Then you moved on.

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  By my trusty notes, that would take you back here.

  Davis:  To Channel Islands, new park, monument 1938, 1978 a Supreme Court decision affirmed that the State of California owned the half of the park that was under water.  The monument was Anacapa and Santa Barbara Islands, with one mile of water around each of them.  So actually more than half of the monument was underwater.

              The Park Service in the mid sixties began site management here, so from ’38 until ’66, it was administered either from Cabrillo or Sequoia Kings Canyon.

  Louter:  The mother ship of Sequoia.

  Davis:  Yes, that’s right.  Sequoia was in charge at a very critical time.  The passage of the Submerged Land Act passed all of the submerged lands within three miles of the shoreline to the states because of oil and gas discoveries, and the states wanted the revenues.  So the Submerged Lands Act was passed in 1954.

              Federal agencies that had an interest in the coast were able to reserve lands as NPS did at Tortugas and Everglades, lots of places.  But there was nobody on site at Channel Islands, so it wasn’t reserved.  I don’t know that there’s an oversight.  I have no idea about that, what drove that, but the bottom line was that in the mid seventies we’re just starting with some resource management in the regional office, and they were helping the park.  They’d noticed that abalone, some lobster, and fishes were declining around Anacapa and Santa Barbara.  So they began monitoring take.  I had contact with them because of what I was doing to monitor fisheries in Everglades at that time, so I sent them my monitoring scheme and then consulted with them periodically.

              About 1976, they decided they needed to close half the monuments’ waters to fishing, to allow recovery, maybe restoration, and perhaps they would see that it would support fisheries in the adjacent waters.  The idea was basically protection.  Things are going bad on us, so we’re not going to fish on the north side of Anacapa or on the east side of Santa Barbara Island.  Federal regulation pre 1969, NEPA stuff, Park Service did that all the time.  Seventy-six, they still hadn’t figured out how to do it.  But it was a very abbreviated NEPA process, needless to say.

              So, basically, CFR regulations changed, and the fishing community found themselves not in compliance, and there were very hard feelings.  The fishermen complained after just a couple of years.  At first they didn’t complain.  Apparently, they had plenty of other places to fish, but after a couple years, they began complaining to the State of California, “How’d you let the feds do that?  Those are California lobsters, California abalone.”  So the state filed suit, and it worked its way up to the Supreme Court.

              In 1978, the Supreme Court said, “No, that all belongs to the state.  It was not reserved.  The Submerged Lands Act of ’54 transferred all of those properties, and all those living green resources are owned by the State of California.”

              The superintendent at the time was Bill Ehorn.  Bill was a young GS-7 ranger at Lassen when I went there as a trainee.  We had worked together.  He taught me what I knew about mountains and rangering, and we’ve maintained contact for many years.  In 1979, he offered me a job here as a chief ranger, but I’d just gotten a promotion at Everglades and decided I would stay there.

  Louter:  You were a permanent employee.  I forgot to ask, all these jobs you were permanent, right?

  Davis:  Yes.  1977, I guess is when he offered.  He came here in ’74.  Shortly thereafter, anyway, I had just gotten a promotion to the same grade, and I was really enjoying South Florida and what I was doing there, so I begged off and said no.  But if he ever got a research scientist position, I’d certainly be happy to come work for him.

              So when he lost the Supreme Court case, he was devastated.  I mean, he sat on Santa Barbara Island the day the decision came in, and the kelp cutter came in and cut through the forest, part of what he had protected, was actually cutting the forest down.  The kelp cutter came in within hours of the decision being handed down in Washington and cut through, and he cried.  He had tried to protect it, he’d done the best he could, and he’d lost.  And he realized at that point he needed more information.  He needed science if he was going to defeat the state in combat.  It was a very competitive thing with him.

  Louter:  Why do they cut kelp?

  Davis:  Kelp contains some products that are hard to synthesize, that are used as emulsifiers in ice cream and toothpaste and create slick paper for photo magazines like National Geographic, and lipstick.  Alginin is the name of the product.  So it’s quite valuable, in addition to being used as agar for bacteriological cultures.  There are over a hundred very lucrative commercial applications for products in there, although that has waned in the last decade or so.  In fact, the company that was doing all that was bought out by several large pharmaceutical companies.  Merck was the last.  Finally, it was bought by an outfit in Scotland, international, and they closed the California operation, in part because there wasn’t enough to demand or high enough price, and then in part because there wasn’t much kelp left in California.

              In the park, we lost 80 percent of the kelp forest in the first twenty years after the park was established.  But that’s a story for down the road a little bit.  But the fact of the matter, that’s what was going on, and it was very visible because the kelp grows from the bottom up to the surface and then lays out a canopy, but maybe two-thirds of the plant is actually laying right at the surface in the top few feet.  What the kelp harvester does is come with a blade four feet below the surface and just cut off that top part of the plant.  Kelp grows a foot to two feet a day under the right conditions, and these are the right conditions, clear clean water so light penetrates deeply.  There are deep ocean currents that bring nutrients up from the depths up to the surface and into lots of sunlight, so that combination of nutrients and sunlight produces absolutely optimum growing conditions for giant kelp.  So this is a great place, this whole southern California bight all the way down into Baja California.  As you go south on Baja, it gets too warm and too many other things can compete for the nutrients and you don’t get the upwelling.  But we get upwelling here off of Point Conception, and that’s the source of the nutrients.

              Anyway, Bill was brokenhearted, knew he needed to change things, and so he began to work on adding Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel to the park.  He actually cut a deal with the Navy for San Miguel to manage it as part of the park long before Congress passed the bill.  So he was managing the Monument islands and San Miguel with this special agreement with the Navy as the park.  So he set about in response to creating the national park and lobbying people and trying to work on that, and he was very successful at that.  Part of it was getting scientists here, and so when a scientist retired in Hawaii, the Regional Science Program reassigned that position to Channel Islands, and that’s when I came here.

  Louter:  I was wondering who that scientist was in Hawaii.

  Davis:  Baker.  He was an animal ecologist, worked on the invasive goats.

  Louter:  Hawaiian volcanoes?

  Davis:  Yes, Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

              Interestingly, while I was still at Everglades, I got a call from a guy by the name of Clay Peters , who was a forester at Lassen when I was there with Bill Ehorn.  Clay had gotten out of the Park Service and was working for the U. S. Senate staff, crafting the legislation for Channel Islands National Park and for an expansion of Biscayne National Monument to become a park.  Clay called me to talk about Biscayne and what regulations were required, what should be—not regulations, but what wording should be put in the legislation that would improve the stewardship of the park.  We chatted about the need for long-term information about the control of fisheries and those kind of issues that he was trying to craft for, and he said, “Oh, by the way, I’m doing Channel Islands, too, with Bill.”  Because we were mutual friends, we talked a bit about that.  So I had some input into what went into that legislation through Clay, and Bill, of course, had had a lot of influence over what was in the legislation because of that relationship and his advocacy of the place.

              So in 1980, the park was established in March.  The law was passed March 5.  In April I got a call from Ehorn, who said, “I got permission to hire a scientist.  Are you going to come work for me?”  So we began working our way through that.

  Louter:  I’m sure it will come up over and over again, but I like the topic of what the agency’s jurisdiction was over the marine environment with the park.  Did the park legislation actually convey some kind of authority over the marine area?

  Davis:  Sometimes it does.  Usually it does.  The Everglades, Florida Bay—do you know the geography of South Florida?  There’s the peninsula and there’s kind of a triangle at the point, Everglades.  There’s 110,000 acres of marine waters in Florida Bay.  The Keys are the boundary on the east side, and the Gulf of Mexico on the west side, and the land at the top.  That’s all in exclusive federal jurisdiction.

              In 1959, the west coast of Everglades was added to the park in exchange for what had been Upper Key Largo was originally in the park boundaries, but it was under tremendous development pressure, and people saw that as value in that, and it cut off.  I mean, if you didn’t build the highways through that to get to the Lower Keys, there wasn’t going to be much development in the Keys.  There’s a lot of pressure not to have the park there, and it included the coral reefs and what are John Pennekamp State Park, and the national marine sanctuary, Florida Keys Sanctuary, were originally within the boundaries of Everglades.  1959, the Collier family, a senator, governors, very influential—

  Louter:  I know of the Colliers.

  Davis:  Yes.  The Collier family had property in the 10,000 Island area.  They recognized it would never be developed.  It was just too low, too swampy, tidal.  They weren’t going to be able to make much money on it, and so they were willing to donate that land.  So a big land swap was arranged and we’d drop Key Largo and the reefs out of the park and add the 10,000 Island area around Everglade City, Chokoloskee were added into the park.  In that section of the park we have concurrent jurisdiction.  By 1959, the states had realized that they wanted to be an equal player with the federal government, so we didn’t have exclusive.  So when we did fishing regulations for Everglades, we had to have different agreements with the state in different places of the park.  We had zones within the park that influenced what kind of regulations we could actually put in place and who we had to consult with.

  Louter:  What is it at Channel Islands?

  Davis:  It’s proprietary.  It’s basically the same as you have as a landowner at your house with the state.

  Louter:  Because proprietary concurrent, exclusive.  In Yosemite, it’s like exclusive, I guess.

  Davis:  Exclusive, oh, yes.

  Louter:  Its own court system that predated the state.

  Davis:  Well, not quite, but—

  Louter:  Not predated the state, but—

  Davis:  Well, the federal government had interest there prior to the state’s establishment.

  Louter:  Out here, then, at Channel Islands, it’s proprietary, meaning?

  Davis:  Well, we have proprietary concurrent.  I don’t think we have—well, we might have some exclusive federal jurisdiction where the Navy had property.  See, the Navy, the Department of Defense, withheld their lands, so their submerged lands off of Point Loma at Cabrillo National Monument and around the islands of San Clemente and San Nicolas, and there’s a zone around parts of San Miguel that are exclusive federal jurisdiction.  So it’s a nightmare.

  Louter:  It’s a mosaic?

  Davis:  Yes, a mosaic of jurisdictions and authorities, and nobody’s quite sure what they can do, other than everybody’s going to be a partner with everybody else.

  Louter:  1980 legislation didn’t clarify?

  Davis:  Well, it clarified that the State of California owned and managed the living marine resources, but it reestablished the thought—I mean, some people said, “Well, what the Supreme Court said was the submerged lands can’t be in the park.  The Park Service has no role out there.”  That’s not what was intended at all, and the Congress reaffirmed that the park boundary was to be established one nautical mile offshore and include the water and submerged lands, but that the authority for managing the fisheries, the living marine resources, resided with the State of California, and it set up, with some very special wording, that the role of federal government was to monitor the condition of those resources and make recommendations about what actions should be taken to better protect them.  But it was up to the state to do the protecting.  The legal regulatory approach was to be done by the state.  Federal role was one of a watchdog and to make recommendations about what should happen, which in the very long term ended up with the marine reserves we have now, the monitoring program that we put in place that led to recommendations over abalone and urchins and kelp that led us to taking an ecosystem approach to establishing marine reserves for restoration. Ownership does not equal jurisdiction and authority.

              So there is a pattern to this and leads us in—especially in the marine areas from the Virgin Islands, from the South Florida experiences where we were trying to do things one species at a time, a more classical fisheries approach where we had a lobster fishery, how do we manage that fishery to make it sustainable.  Oh, and we had a stone crab fishery.  How do we do that?  We have a coral reef.  Let’s just take care of the corals.  Slowly it dawned on us that if we didn’t take an ecosystem approach, it wasn’t going to work.  But in a marine environment, in regulatory environment of fisheries, they were done one species at a time.

  Louter:  Interesting.  Is there an accumulative effect in your experience, then, right around in here?

  Davis:  Yes.  Oh, yes, yes.  It built from all the way from why don’t we protect the things.  You go down to the Virgin Islands.  “Wow, what a great place.  This is a park, right?”

              “Yes.”

              “Can I collect the shells?”

              “Oh, yes.”

              “Can I spear the fish?”

              “Oh, yes.”

              What makes it a park?  Is it protected or not, you know?  [laughs]  Well, yes, it’s scenic, and, “Oh, well, we do protect things in Trunk Bay,” this one little bay where it was very popular for swimming, and we’d put in an underwater trail, and so, “Well, we want to have fish for people to look at.”

              I said, “Don’t we have fish everywhere in the park?  With 5,600 acres of submerged lands in the park, don’t we want that to be different?”

              “Well, yeah, we do, but we don’t want to keep people from fishing.  And they have traditionally fished with traps here, so we let the people continue to do that.”  But not here, not in this place.

              So we had two very small places, one at Buck Islands National Monument and one at Trunk Bay in Virgin Islands National Park that were closed to fishing, and that was the extent of it.  There were little places like that and a few places in parks where fishing was prohibited, one lake at Lassen.  We had those kinds of showplaces, and you’re right, it was scenery, basically.  It was about what people could see in those places, and a certain amount of denial, although not thought through, but a certain amount of denial that the fishing that was going on was having an impact on the whole system or even on the populations.  “This is a renewable resource, like mowing the lawn.  You’ve got to keep cutting it.  It keeps growing back.  No harm done.”

              So, yes, my cumulative experience was seeing the effects, the cumulative effects, and seeing that the species-by-species restoration efforts that we made were insufficient to give us the outcome that we needed to have, that we wanted to have.  But we went that route.  So in Dry Tortugas, we started studying lobsters.  Commercial fishing had stopped in 1935 when the monument was established, but recreational take continued, and it was limited to two lobsters per person per day, which allowed some people to enjoy the experience of eating fresh lobster on the site.  When we looked at that and found out that at, two per person per day, the eight-month season took half of the lobster population, and it took fifteen years to replace it, we said, “That’s unacceptable.  So with the concurrence of the state, we will close the fishery in the park and we’ll use those lobsters as replenishment for larval production for the rest of the state.”

              Then thirty years later we actually saw the real benefits of that.  When we stopped lobster fishing at Tortugas in ’74, the largest females weren’t reproducing at all.  They were producing no eggs.  We had no idea what it was about, but we went ahead and protected them anyway.  Turns out it took twenty-five years to grow large enough male lobsters to overpower those really big females.

  Louter:  Twenty-five years?

  Davis:  Yes.  Well, there’s not much difference in the growth rates of males and females.  Males are growing a little bit faster because they don’t waste their time putting energy into eggs.  But the males have to be quite a bit larger than the females.  They have to actually physically roll them over on their back to run over the top of them, and they put the sperm packet on the underside of the lobster and it sticks to her.  Then because of that behavioral thing, then she actually goes ahead and produces the eggs and extrudes them, and then she scratches at the sperm pack, which releases the sperm and allows them to fertilize the eggs.  But if the male’s not big enough to physically overpower the female, it ain’t happening.  If that doesn’t happen, then she doesn’t extrude the eggs; she just reabsorbs them.  We didn’t have any understanding of any of that.  And like I said, it was literally twenty-five years later before we began to see that.  I mean, I was long gone.  I was here, and the guys I worked with, with the state in Florida were going out to Tortugas and said, “You won’t believe this, but the big females are starting to produce eggs now.”  We started goofing around with it a little bit and figured out what had happened, and it just took twenty-five, thirty years before we saw the real effects of what we had done in the early seventies just to protect one species.

  Louter:  Fascinating.

  Davis:  Yes, lots of fun things.

  Louter:  Are these the same lobsters that we’re eating in Maine, Maine lobster?

  Davis:  No, different family.  Quite different.

  Louter:  The industry would be gone, right?

  Davis:  Yes.  The lobsters from Florida are like the ones in the upper left up there, no big claws in the front.  They are in temperate and tropical waters around the world, about seventy species.

  Louter:  So when you came here, and I don’t know if I have this right, but were you stationed right here at Channel Islands or were you an employee?

  Davis:  I was an employee of the regional office.

  Louter:  How did that work?

  Davis:  From my perspective, it worked really well, in part because I had this longstanding personal professional relationship with the superintendent, with Bill Ehorn.  So we already knew and trusted each other, and he knew that by will of personality and his past experience and as a mentor to me, he knew that he would be able to influence, or believed he could influence, the kinds of things that I did, and that I would be able to meet his needs.  He was very comfortable with that.

              The regional office folks were at least comfortable with the idea that I was going to work for them, but I’d be at the park, that I had enough of a background and a track record to show that I was going to do real science that would meet the standards of science in the 1970s.  So they were comfortable with it.  So both sides were okay with it.  Funding came from the regional office.  My salary was paid there.  But administratively, leave and timekeeping and all that stuff were done here at the park.

  Louter:  You were here, in the office here.

  Davis:  Physically here.  This building was not here at that time.  We were in a three-bedroom bungalow across the harbor, and there was a trailer in the parking lot.  The chief ranger was in one end of the trailer, Rob Arnberger.  He and I arrived here on the same day, the twenty-seventh of July in 1980.  And I had the other end of the trailer.  Ehorn had just arranged that.  Since the park was established just in March, he had launched his new boat, the Pacific Ranger, so the park finally had a large support vessel that could support diving operations and stay at the islands for days at a time comfortably.  Then in July he got a new chief ranger and a new research scientist.  So the park was growing.  Plans for this were under way.  They’d actually had plans for a much larger Visitors Center on the other side of the harbor, but NPS Director Bill Whalen cancelled that.  It was too big and too showy.  I don’t know.  Do you know the stories of the ups and downs of Visitors Centers?

  Louter:  Yes.

  Davis:  Yes.  So this was the downsized version of a Visitors Center, was over here.  So they started construction on this sometime in either the winter—yes, I think it was probably December of  ’80 or early ’81.  I moved into this office when the building was finished.  So I’ve been in the office since then.

  Louter:  Very neat.  Doesn’t look like you’ve been here for thirty-some, almost thirty years.

              The other question related to that is, I had in my notes that you were at UC Davis, employed through the CPSU, but stationed here.  Did I write that down correctly?

  Davis:  That’s correct.

  Louter:  They considered you a regional office employee?

  Davis:  That’s right, because my supervisor at the university worked for—well, we all worked directly for, in the beginning, we all worked for the chief scientist.

  Louter:  Out of the regional?

  Davis:  The regional office, right.

  Louter:  That was something new, right?

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  I mean this whole development of CPSUs, staffing them with research associates or research scientists, having them report to the regional chief scientist for the region.

  Davis:  Right.  Well, one of the things that happened in about 1979, ’78, ’79, somewhere along in there, was kind of a dissolution of the chief scientist’s office in Washington, D.C., and his principal staff were distributed out.  I think it’s in Dick Sellar’s book.

  Louter:  Yes, in ’78.  Or let’s wait.

  Davis:  Yes, that’s about right.  Yes, that’s right.  It was in the late seventies that they were dispersed out to—it might have even been earlier than that.  It might have been ’77.  They became chief scientists in each of the ten regions.  There were ten people that went out from his staff.

  Louter:  Then the science assumed the directorate-level position in Washington, but that doesn’t mean that the staff stayed there.

  Davis:  No, that’s right.  What happened was, in essence, it was a final outcome of the conflict that began at Flamingo in 1971 between Everglade Superintendent Joe Brown and Bob Linn.  Bob basically lost that battle and, subsequently, lost the war over who was going to be in charge, and in the late seventies, his principal staff were distributed to the regions and supervised by the regional directors.  It was just a way of distributing the science expertise, and it was a better way of growing.  It was more in line with the authorities in the Park Service, rather than have Bob and his empire—and Bob wasn’t trying to build an empire; he just wanted more good science for parks.  But he thought the best way to do that, because superintendents were stealing money and turning research into toilet paper and dump trucks, and to keep that from happening, he thought he needed to control that, I think.  But distributing those guys was really a great thing, and then they functioned together as a group because they had sources of funding for research that came through the regional offices.  But it went to those guys to set the priorities.  That was a new thing in the late seventies that occurred, and Denny Fenn was the chief scientist in 1980 when I came.

  Louter:  So just to think about how the structure of the CPSU work for a second, even though you reported to the chief scientist, money and regional office, they had you on the books as working for the CPSU?

  Davis:  Eventually.  Because the CPSU was also new.  It was even newer than having the regional chief scientist.  That’s what Don Field was doing.  Don was the regional chief scientist in Seattle, and he created that concept.  If he hadn’t been there as regional chief scientist, it might not have happened, but he was able to do that and show the value of that.  So other regions began to pick that up.  So the western region then added California, Hawaii, Arizona, and said, “Oh, yeah, this is a really cool idea.”

              After that happened, there were people who were quite senior and very jealous of working as high in the organization as they could.  They wanted to work for regional chief scientists.  They didn’t want to work for CPSU coordinator.  So there was a lot of resistance to actually being structured within the science program to work for the CPSUs.  But, eventually, I mean, it was inevitable.  That’s the way it needed to be, because it was beyond the span of control for a chief scientist to supervise twenty-one research scientists in four states scattered all over the Pacific Ocean, it was just too much.  So it made more sense for the chief scientist to supervise four or five CPSU coordinators and have them supervise the other people.  So eventually I worked for Charles Van Riper  Actually, I think Charlie left the CPSU at Davis, and Steve Veirs was probably the one that I worked for.  Charlie was there and we all worked together.  He was basically there.  We worked in parks like Sequoia and Kings Canyon,  Yosemite.  So there were sixteen or seventeen in 1980 when I came.

  Louter:  You guys were the research-grade?

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  Having had that [unclear]?

  Davis:  That’s right.  It was research-grade evaluation, so four-factor evaluation.

  Louter:  You’re still GS level?

  Davis:  It was GM, actually, a category that’s gone now.  That grew out of the Carter administration and merit pay.

  Louter:  So the idea that the regional chief scientist who had direct supervision over probably everybody, but the direct supervision was over the research coordinators and CPSUs who, in turn, had daily operational but—

  Davis:  Well, what they set was your professional guidance about what kind of research should you do, and your grade was actually determined by the research-grade evaluation process that was set by OPM.  So that supervisor really didn’t have a whole lot to say about what you did, and that’s why the chief scientist could actually get away with supervising twenty people and their local staff in San Francisco or Oakland, because guidance for the research scientist was set every four years when you did the evaluation process.  It’s a peer review process.  It’s a lot like tenure in the university.

  Louter:  Did you get tenure every four years?

  Davis:  Yes.  You had to meet the  “What have you done for me lately?” test. Publications from four years ago didn’t count anymore.  You had publications from the last four years.  Now, you could build a track record and talk about how things built and what you were doing that was better, and you didn’t get much credit.  If you just did the same kinds of projects, like restoration of a mouse, restoration of a little bird, you know, if you were just taking care of endangered species, people would look at you and say, “That’s the same project, just different species.  That’s not innovative.  That’s not growing or building or going to higher levels or trying new things and doing something different.”

              So the standards were quite high, and it was really a good thing for career development.  It’s the best thing that I came across in my time with the Park Service.  The annual evaluations were not very helpful in building a career.  The research-grade evaluation process, on the other hand, caused you to look at “What am I doing here?  Am I just chasing the money and doing projects as they show up, or if somebody asks me to do this or do that, or am I building the body of knowledge that will benefit the park, that will have a greater understanding of how this ecosystem functions or what are the consequences of this policy or that policy and how do those all fit together in our mission for conservation?”

              So the research-grade evaluation process tells you, “Look at your career.  You’re likely to achieve four or five major things in the whole career, so begin to look at what those pieces might be, how you develop those, who you need partnerships with.  How are you going to make these things happen?”  So I began that at Everglades with the research staff that we developed there, that we organized ourselves.

  Louter:  Was that a research-grade position there?

  Davis:  Yes.  We created those.  When I went there, I was a management biologist, and there came a time in the development of the programs, in the evolution of the Everglades programs, that I got to make a choice about, “Are you going to stay on the management side?  Are you going to go over to the research side?” and I chose to go to the research side.  Larry Bancroft was the other management biologist at that point, and because he was doing mostly fire ecology and he needed the rangers to work with him on a day-to-day basis to implement fire and invasive species, he needed the workforce of the rangers and their equipment and their capacity to move around in the park to do this work.  Whereas what I was doing in the marine environment was much more research.  We didn’t know what to do.  We didn’t understand how it worked or what the impacts of fishing were going to have and how they would cascade through the system.  So the work that I was doing was much more research oriented.  So I chose to go to the research side and ended up becoming the center director or the research director for the program.  So I made a transition from the management side to the research side of the house at Everglades.

  Louter:  On that topic alone, like all these things, it’s interesting because it’s almost like a metaphor for the way the Park Service uses science, uses science for the sake of science or does it all have to translate into management decisions, or is it resource management, I guess, I should say.

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  And it makes sense if you have two tracks.

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  Management biologist and a research biologist.  But if you get rid of one side, then there’s no—

  Davis:  Then the other will compensate.  That’s what happens, is that the management side will start to do more research if you remove research.  If you remove the management side, the research people will start doing the mitigation work.  It’s a package.  It all has to get done.  The metaphor I use for that is a medical one, is that the way doctors treated high blood pressure not too long ago was to reduce blood volume.  You opened a vein or you put a leech on it, right?  And you reduced the blood volume and blood pressure went down, so hypertension was solved.  Right?  Well, you were just treating the symptom, not the cause.  And until you understand the system, that’s what you’re stuck with.  You still have to treat it or you get dead people or you get impaired parts.  But if you understand enough about the system, then you can deal with the causes, which is much more effective in the long term, strategically.

              That’s where we were at Everglades.  On land with fire, with invasive species, Larry knew enough about the system, he could begin to deal with causes, and he knew where the sources of the invasives were coming from, and he knew, because of Bill Robertson’s twenty years of research, how to deal with fire.  But on the marine side, we weren’t there yet.  We needed to understand the system better.

  Louter:  So you come in.  At some point technically you’re stationed at UC Davis but you’re out here.

  Davis:  Right.

  Louter:  Then from that time on, you’re here.

  Davis:  Yes.  I’m here from 1980 on.

  Louter:  To the very present, to this moment?

  Davis:  To this moment.  But there was that little diversion in 1993 to 1996 or thereabouts when Mr. Babbitt ran me off.  [laughs]

  Louter:  Oh, that’s right, the—

  Davis:  The National Biological Survey.

  Louter:  And the Channel Islands Research Station?

  Davis:  Yes, that’s right.  That’s what it became.  He created the National Biological Survey, and the idea was to develop a wall, a firewall, between research and the application of the knowledge by the managers who were advocates of the system.  Mr. Babbitt was convinced that if you have the scientists in the Park Service doing the research and then advocating its application to a particular strategy, they lost their credibility, and he wanted to make sure that there was some insulation between the superintendents who were advocating for various policies, and the development of the information, the knowledge, the understanding of the system.  That’s true.  We felt in the western region that we had insulated them by having them work for the regional office and the regional director, not for the superintendent at the park.  Mr. Babbitt didn’t think that was enough insulation, and he needed critical mass to make a large enough organization, so he took 1,500 FTEs from the Fish and Wildlife Service Research Program, which they had conveniently organized into a region.  It wasn’t a geographic region; it was a functional region.  So he got 1,500 people there.  He got 150 FTEs from the Park Service.

  Louter:  There were 150 research scientists in the National Park Service?

  Davis:  Yes.  We were really starting to make progress, up from six when I started in the Virgin Islands in 1968, to 150.  Now we’re over 2,000.

  Louter:  There are actually 2,000 research scientists?

  Davis:  Well, there are 2,000 people with Ph.D.’s doing science in the Park Service.  We’re not doing research because of the secretary’s decision, but we needed people with that kind of training.  We just found a different way to structure and organize things with the Natural Resources Program centered in Fort Collins, with Mike Soukup’s operation in Washington (Natural Resources Stewardship and Science), with the regional offices and with the inventory and monitoring programs that have put people in the field and available to parks.  So that capacity is what we have increased.  That was, in my way of thinking, the first significant response to the 1963 reports.  See, we were trying to build very slowly, and we’d gotten up to 150 research scientists in the service in central offices and in the parks, and each region had their own way of managing how those people went about their business.  In the Southeast, they were largely in parks like Everglades and Smokies.  In the West, they were in parks, but managed by the regional offices.

  Louter:  So let me ask you what your take on the motivation for the Biological Survey really was, or is that what you just told me what you think was going on over there?

  Davis:  I mean, there was a legacy concern.  Mr. Babbitt wanted to leave a legacy.  You know, that was one of his publicly stated things.  I never had a private conversation with him about it, but I believe him, that as a young person he’d had a wonderful experience sitting around a campfire with the Geological Survey people in Arizona, you know, and he felt that the Geological Survey was just a wonderful thing and that he wanted to leave that kind of a legacy, and in biology, he could do that, and he had the capacity within his organization to do it.

              I think that was very powerful with him, and the way it actually happened was another one of those happenstance things, that one afternoon, it must have been a Friday, it was late and he called to the Fish and Wildlife Service late in the afternoon, wanted to talk to Doug Buffington who was the chief of the research region, and Doug wasn’t in.  One of his deputies or assistants, Ted La Roe was there.  Ted supervised the cooperative wildlife units at the universities.  Ted had had a dream for many years that research should be a separate entity in the department.  It should be separate, not just another region.  It should really be separate.  When Ted got on the phone with Mr. Babbitt, they really hit it off.  I don’t remember now what the question was that the secretary had, but when he and Ted started talking, it really worked for them, and the secretary had found his champion.  He gave it to Ted and said, “Run with this.  We want to do this.”

              Doug Buffington hated the idea.  He wanted to stay in the Fish and Wildlife Service.  He had worked out a real nice arrangement for doing research.  He had twelve center directors that owed him great allegiance, not unlike George Hartzog. He had organized that thing, and, boy, he was really happy about it, and he didn’t want Park Service people in it.  He was just pissed that the whole thing happened.  But it was that phone call to Ted and the Secretary that started the NBS.  Once the secretary had a champion on the ground who really believed in it and who was a real research scientist, he could make that happen.  It really took off.  It gained a life of its own.

              Ted was a friend because he had done some benthic mapping in Biscayne National Monument in the beginning when the park was established, so he and I had met several times before, so I knew him.  So I heard that story several times from him.  We actually carved out—I remember sitting in the Park Service director’s conference room.  Ted came in to find out which scientists—we were trying to decide on who’s going to go into NBS and who’s going to stay in the Park Service.  So we were trying to draw these lines and, of course, we’re trying to protect as much as we can, but the research-grade people were just dead meat.  I mean, you knew they were gone because that was the function of the new organization, but we were trying to decide whether or not people in the monitoring programs would go or stay.

              Ted and I actually sat next to each other and we negotiated back and forth, and I said, “Well, you don’t want people in this new organization, the research people, going out and reading plant transects like the BLM does for grazing.”

              And he says, “No, that’s not our intent.”

              I said, “Well, that’s what the monitoring people are going to do in the parks.”

              So we carved out monitoring, and it got to stay in the Park Service.  And he was good with that, and it’s what allowed us to build the science capacity around something that was directly tied to management and to park mission, but required substantial professional development and required Ph.D.’s to design and manage and run the program.  It’s real science-based ecosystem-based management.  So that’s how we carved out the foundation for what became the Natural Resource Challenge.

  Louter:  So it was written.

  Davis:  So it was written, exactly.  That was really funny.  It’s funny how you see those things.  Like I say, I really do feel like Forrest Gump.  You’re just kind of there, watching all this.  Ted writes it down on a pad, just like you just wrote that down, and that’s what became the law of the land, and when the secretary signed the order and said, “These people move, these people can stay, but these are the ones I want.  They’re all going in this new organization.”

  Louter:  The research-grade scientists seem like they’re sort of Executive Service, like SES.

  Davis:  Well, there’s an upper limit to that.  They’re called ST and SL positions, not SES.  They are in the OPM system, but the Park Service has none.  We’re authorized to have six, and Mike Soukup  has been trying very hard to get some people appointed.  He’s nominated two people.  So we were trying to figure out how to make that work, and for me it wasn’t as important personally as it was as a recognition that there’s the highest level in government scientist’s position in the Park Service.  It would be a clear signal that NPS is a science-based organization.  NPS  uses science as a guiding principle, and that’s the way that you demonstrate that, that we’ve got these six positions and we should fill them, and they still need to be filled.  I think that the time has passed for Mike to be able to do them, but that is a chore for the next associate director, is to fill those positions.

              But, yes, they are quite executive.  Their grade is determined by their productivity in research and the contributions they make to science, both to science organizations, to leadership in associations and societies like AAAS and American Fisheries Society, those kind of things, to their published work and the complexity and the scope of the tasks that they are assigned.  So those kinds of things determine it.  It’s not the nine factor that you look at in more traditional executive positions, what the rest of civil service positions are, where there are nine lines in the position description and the performance evaluation and you consider all of those.  It’s called four-factor or RGE.  It’s not how many people you supervise or how much money you’ve got; it’s your productivity, bottom line, and the publications count twice as much as the other categories.  So it’s very much a publish/perish kind of a paradigm.  So they don’t require a whole lot of supervision.  There’s not much you can do with them, not much more training you can give them.

  Louter:  They just go and they work.

  Davis:  They go.  Part of being a professional is that you are a lifelong learner, right?  You’re going to continue to learn things.  You’re going to do things.  It’s not like you just go over in the corner, but you continue to search out new things, new experiences, and learn from that, build on it.  That’s the success.  The assumption is that you can be productive and progress.  Your grade can go down in research-grade evaluation.  It is not ratcheted up.  If you don’t produce, then your grade goes down after four years.  That doesn’t happen very often, but it happens.  I know of two cases in my career of watching that happen, so I know that it happens.

  Louter:  Do you think the removal had any reflection on the agency not being a true scientific agency, that history of science having such a hard time making its foothold in the Park Service?

  Davis:  I think there may have been some feelings in the secretary’s mind or in his office that the Park Service was not investing enough in science, but I think that was a minor consideration.  I think he was after bigger things.

  Louter:  Legacy.

  Davis:  Yes, legacy was an important part of it.  But that’s a little bit cynical.  The legacy he wanted to leave was a better science-based organization at Interior.  The secretary, rightfully so, from his perspective, looked at Interior as an agency, as a bureau that worked on things together, whereas the bureaus look at it as a collection of things that are pretty disparate.  Minerals Management Service goals and the Bureau of Surface Mining are really different than the Park Service or the Fish and Wildlife Service.  We don’t see much family there, right?  Yet the secretary saw it all as one big happy family, and I don’t think he ever realized how different they were.  His goal was to try to get them all to work together, whereas as the agency just went, “This is our goal, we’re really excited about this, and we’re really going to work on it.”  But he wanted to do that bigger thing.  I think that’s really what was driving him.  He could see that you could do more of that.

              Now, in the past, clearly, and I think Dick did a fine job on the book I’m talking about.  The Everglades Research Program was developed not by the Park Service, but by the assistant secretary’s office.  Nat Reed forced the Park Service to take the money and the people.  Park Service kept rejecting it.  Three times they rejected it.  It’s very biblical.  [laughs]

  Louter:  You mean where you had that staff like fifty-some research scientists.

  Davis:  Yes, to get that.  The Park Service wouldn’t ask for the money.  Nat Reed was the assistant secretary.  He was from Florida.  He wanted to do something for the park, and he tried.  He got things started, got the environmental studies going, got those first spaghetti diagrams from Tom Odom, and then he ran off, Nat Reed did, ran off and dealt with bears at the Yellowstone.  At the end of his tenure, he came back and wanted to do something more for Everglades and South Florida.

              We had made the case broadly to the scientific community, to the other management agencies, and to the Park Service that we needed more research.  We needed to understand the system better.  The Park Service didn’t want to hear that.  The regional office didn’t want to hear it.  Superintendent was on board, each of them, and some of them got moved because they were such powerful advocates for it.  Certainly the director didn’t want to hear it.  George Hartzog didn’t want to hear it.  That was not his thing.  Of course, George was gone.  Oh, no, he was still active, but no longer Director.  Yes, he was gone at the time that those decisions were made, but the feeling was still very strong that “We don’t want this,” and it was really over the protests of the Park Service that the secretary forced the money in Everglades.  We did three huge program reviews with outsiders coming in from the assistant secretary’s office, from the secretary’s office, before the Park Service was forced to take it.  They kept rejecting it, but they were finally forced to take it.

              So the question’s a good one.  Was the Park Service really not doing its job in using science?  In the seventies, that was certainly true, but I think by the early nineties we were well on our way to recognizing we needed to do more and better science.

  Louter:  Interesting, because, you know, it’s not just for scientists.  I mean, anybody who conducts research in any field will at some point hear that research is sort of a luxury.  That’s like, “You’re lucky you get to do research.  There are so many other things that are really important and pressing to do.”  It’s finding parity for research with the other management allegations that it is interesting.  That’s where I’m coming from when I ask that question about does it seem like the agency has this reputation for not being interested in research, because we talk about, as Dick does in his book, how important the research is to making informed decisions.  However, when it comes to actually putting money towards the people or the projects, it seems that we end up in this sort of paradoxical kind of question and situation where we want it, but we can’t have it, or why.  It’s too much fun or it’s people just aren’t out there their doing their own—puttering around doing their own little thing.  Or maybe on the other hand—

  Davis:  Too expensive.

  Louter:  Too expensive, or you find that the research reveals things that you have to deal with that you didn’t really want to.

  Davis:  Yes, that’s right.  Things that you don’t want to have to deal with and acknowledge, even after the research is so uncertain, that you’d have done nearly as well just by guessing, really and truly.  You know, somebody who’s in tune with the park, somebody who knows it, who walks around in it, kind of the old-time naturalist, the guy who’s out there, Bill Ehorn knew this park very well and so he felt he could make decisions that were as good as any science that we could give him, and he was probably right in the seventies, but he wasn’t anymore in the eighties.  The science has gotten better.  Our knowledge has improved.  The reliability of what we can do now and the information we can provide, the predictions we can make, are much better now than they were twenty-five or thirty years ago.  So, yes, things are changing. Bill was visionary and led the change.

              I think that you’re absolutely right.  It’s an accurate observation that we weren’t using it.  There are a number of reasons for that.  But you go back to the justification, it’s the high blood-pressure thing.  You can treat causes or you can treat symptoms.  What you do by the seat of the pants is treat symptoms.  When it comes up and bites you, then you jump on it.  Sometimes it’s too late to do anything about it.  That’s right, and so it’s gone and you didn’t even know about it.  We have half a dozen great examples at Channel Islands of how we avoided those kinds of disasters because we had a monitoring program in place, things like island fox populations that would have just been gone before anybody would have noticed they were gone if we hadn’t been monitoring carefully, precisely.  The little incremental changes in the population and the lack of reproduction, brown pelicans out here, same way.  Those birds live for thirty years.  If you waited for the adults to die, you wouldn’t have known they weren’t being replaced because DDT stopped reproduction like twenty-five years earlier.  It would have been too late if we’d have waited.  But because people were monitoring reproduction, egg production, fledgling success, we were looking at all facets of that, we were able to get an early warning that, “Hey, you know what?  Ten years from now there’s only going to be half as many adults because we didn’t grow any this year.  None were produced, and so we need to change that.”

              So it’s those kinds of examples, I think, that have helped us sell the value of the science, that it’s better, faster, and cheaper if we do the research than if we wait for things to pop up and then we’ll fix them.  The problem’s getting bigger and bigger and involved more people.  It’s not just within the park.

  Louter:  I’m, being a historian, thinking of the parallels to my work or other people’s work, because we argue the same thing.  We call it documentation.  Go out and do the research so that you know what you have and then measure change based on that research.

  Davis:  That’s right.  Yes, we’re in the same business.

  Louter:  Except sometimes we do the research too late or come across something when it’s already [unclear].

  Davis:  I mean, that is the fear, and we have to guard against that in the monitoring programs, and the vital signs monitoring is we don’t just sit around and document the demise of the park and the resources that the American people want to preserve.  We’ve got to be better than that.  That’s the very minimum, and that’s a loss.  There’s no reason to pay for the documentation if that’s all you get out of it.  You’ve got to be able to be more proactive and learn from that experience and get out ahead of it.

  Louter:  I want to end just with this one thought, and then we can take a break with that.  I’m still struck by this generalist-versus-specialist viewpoint, perhaps, that this discussion brings up, because [unclear] talk about Bill Ehorn.  Does that still characterize much or did that ever characterize much of what in your career to this point or to the getting here [unclear]?  Because there is sort of a generalist idea.  It could be that there could be the naturalist, or it could just be the experienced person in the field.

              I mean, an example is that there’s a discussion among very well-intentioned, very smart grad students who were studying grasslands and ranching in Colorado area and New Mexico area, were very surprised to learn that the ranchers actually had a much better understanding of ecosystems than they do.  They just made these assumptions that they didn’t.  Then they wrote on about how amazing that whole—like this great discovery that they come across people like that, when they didn’t realize their own arrogance at thinking that others didn’t know.

              So, I mean, when I say specialization versus generalization or general sort of views, I mean, it can be anything from—was it maybe to your advantage not to have a specialist, a specialization where you could learn everything about lobsters to tortoises, to coral reef, to something else, as opposed to someone who came in, their specialty was they’d spent five years in a Ph.D. program and they were like, “This is what I do.”

  Davis:  Right.  I think that we need a whole range of people and focal points.  You need the generalist in the big picture, but you also need some of those people who are specialists and that’s all they do is parasites.  And a little bit of everything in between, and there are different places for them in the organization.  But if an organization only has six scientists, you don’t have much room for diversity, so it’s only the development of a critical mass of science technical expertise that allows you to have that range, and that came from people who were, of necessity, generalists, or today we would consider them generalists.  At their time, like George Wright, who was pretty much a specialist in the Park Service, so it’s kind of even who you are changes with time, and the general knowledge, the organization, a lot of those things change.

              I was certainly a specialist.  I was a generalist when I started in the ranger business, but quickly went into very narrow focus into marine ecology and fisheries, and I did pick, on purpose, to work on some flagship species that people cared about, but that exemplified ecological principles that we needed to make, and say this species is really important in the system.  All species are important, but this one’s really important, and it’s already connected to people because it supports fisheries.  It has behaviors.  It’s charismatic.  Whatever the reason is, pick some things that people already care about, and then as you find out more about how they fit into the system, it’s much easier then to get people to listen to you talk about why we need to take an ecosystem approach.

              So lobsters did that for me in South Florida, in all three of the parks.  It worked really well.  As it turns out, there’s this wonderful interaction of the three places, the Tortugas and Everglades and Biscayne, that I had no idea about when I started, that Tortugas is the place where the larvae are produced, where the large concentrations of large individuals reside.  They produce the larvae that then float around in the ocean for nine months and end up in Florida Bay and in Biscayne Bay, and they settle out in those nursery areas, they grow up, and they walk, literally walk back out to the coral reef and walk back out to the Tortugas.  So by the Park Service protecting the adult larval production plant, if you will, and the two nursery areas, it supports the rest of the Florida fishery, just by taking care of those habitats, and we didn’t know that when we started.  We just started at one species, one place, at the Tortugas mostly because of scenery.  We wanted to see big lobsters.

  Louter:  Charismatic mega fauna lobster.

  Davis:  Exactly.  Well, they live seventy-five years and get to be that, and that’s not a bad critter.  That study started—again, it was another one of those accidental things, that I was on my first orientation trip to Tortugas, and the ranger wanted to show me the big lobsters.  They’re out in a little shallow patch reef.  He showed me a couple places.  We went out to his favorite place.  We jumped in the water, and the bottom was littered with what are called heads of the lobsters, just the  cephlothoraxes.  The tails were gone.  Somebody had poached them.  They had jumped in the water the night before, or the day before, wrung the tails, put them in a bag, and took them way.  They probably got five hundred pounds of lobster out of that.

  Louter:  Old lobster.

  Davis:  Yes, big old lobsters, right?  And he was mortified, and I thought, “Well, I’m new to this.  Gee, these are really big lobsters.  Let’s collect them all.”  So we collected all of these heads, put them in a bag, took them back to the dock, and I had them spread out on the back of the boat and on the dock, and I was measuring them all and determining the sex and just recording what I could about injuries, just natural history stuff to learn what I could.

              The director of International Affairs Program for the Park Service was visiting the park.  It was a special trip for him for some reason.  He looked at this, he took a picture of it, took it back, showed it to George Hartzog and said, “We have to do something about this.  We’re not adequately protecting the resources at Tortugas.”

              George called the superintendent.  He didn’t bother the regional director.  He called Superintendent Joe Brown and said, “We need to fix that out there at the Tortugas.  Do what you have to do.”

  Louter:  Study.

  Davis:  So I started a study on lobsters based on that, just out of the curiosity, but because Fred took a picture and showed it to the director.

  Louter:  Excellent.

  Davis:  Yes.  That’s the Forrest Gump thing, you know.  You’re just kind of there and all this stuff happens.

  Louter:  One break.

  Davis:  Okay.

  [Begin File 3]

  Louter:  Take three.

              Thinking about the role of research and policymaking, before we go back to the last few years of your career, all through the sixties and seventies, that’s a time when science is sort of losing its—not its authority, but there’s a time when people realize that science can be politicized.

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  You see it in things like Three Mile Island, where you have all these great experts talking about, in language a lot of people can’t understand, using metaphors like “it’s a horserace” for describing the meltdown and people are trying to figure out, well, is science above all these other—where’s this great objectivity?  Is it above all these other issues?  All of a sudden you realize, well, everybody can hire their own expert who might argue on their behalf.

  Davis:  So you have dueling scientists.  You waste a lot of time and spend a lot of time in court as a result of not being able to move public policy forward because of the disagreements and opinions, and so if you’re going to have an effective science-based organization, you need to find out how to deal with that issue.  Don’t wait to get to the dueling scientists and lose control of the situation by going to court and letting a judge make a decision.  You could do a lot better by forming coalitions at the ground level and get the science straight so that as you move to the policy level, everybody agrees on the science.  That was the challenge of the early eighties, was to try and move in that direction away from building your own empire, building your own army to go out and do battle with the other guys, but to do things cooperatively.  And we’re making some progress.

  Louter:  Yes.  It’s interesting.

  Davis:  Well, as resources get fewer and fewer, the competition will either increase and nobody gets what they need, or if you pool your efforts, then you actually can provide more information and make better informed decisions.  So I think in actual fact, the scarcity of resources in the 1980s for government drove people into more partnerships than they would have been otherwise.

  Louter:  1993, ’97, covered that.

  Davis:  Oh, yes, the NBS.

  Louter:  Well, they started the NBS and then—

  Davis:  Into USGS.

  Louter:  You were brought on.  You actually worked with Secretary Babbitt to facilitate this whole transition for the Park Service?

  Davis:  He sent me a plaque.  Yes, see, “Outstanding contributions to the establishment of the National Biological Survey.”  Fell off the wall in an earthquake and chipped the corner.

              Yes, I served on two organizational committees as they were forming the Biological Survey.  They needed some people who knew what was going on in the agencies to help figure out how to make the transition, and so I spent some time in Washington with a lot of other people, but working on that and meeting the people from Fish and Wildlife Services and BLM and Minerals Management Service, trying to figure out how we could best organize things.  We were in these things called Cooperative Park Studies Units, had “cooperative” in the title, and we were at a university.  Fish and Wildlife Service had Fish and Wildlife Co-op Units, cooperative units.  So, organizationally, they said, “Oh, University, Fish and Wildlife Service Cooperatives.  They must belong together.”  So they were slammed together.  Well, the Fish and Wildlife Service Co-op Units are legislatively mandated.  They are managed by a triumvirate of the university, of the Fish and Wildlife Service as an agency, and by the state Fish and Game Departments.  They have money that is directed toward managing fish and wildlife, primarily for harvest, deer and ducks and trout and things like that, whereas the Park Service Cooperative Park Studies Units were much more broadly ecological, searching out the function of ecosystems providing support for park managers.  Very, very different.  Money came only from the Park Service.  There was no other mandated source.  It was however the park managers felt like spending money.

              It wasn’t a comfortable fit, and the former Fish and Wildlife Service people didn’t want any part of the park people, and it took us a year of trying to put all that together in California before we said, “This just isn’t going to work, so what we need to do is create a virtual research center.”

              The other Fish and Wildlife Service research people were in centers.  They were actually mostly brick-and-mortar structures, and then they had field stations all over the country.  So there’s a Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, that’s a campus, and they had field stations all over the United States, with one or two research scientists and their staffs working on avian malaria in Hawaii or manatees in Florida, manatee health, viruses of sea turtles.  So they’ve got these offices all over.

              We said, “Okay, that’s a better model for us, but we don’t have the money or the time or the staff.  We want to keep the scientists in parks, so let’s create a virtual center.”  It’s kind of a replacement for the CPSU because we put the office, and it was the same people, at UC Davis, and so we created with the Fish and Wildlife people, because they had a mass of people.  They must have had fifteen people at Davis as well.  So Fish and Wildlife Service, Park Service, we combined our efforts.  So I spent a year working on that, trying to resolve that issue.

              At the same time, the Gingrich Congress was trying to destroy the National Biological Survey because they didn’t want Mr. Babbitt to have a legacy.  So the department changed the name of the agency from Survey to Service, thinking that would solve the problem.  Somehow I think that was really naïve, but be that as it may, they did that.  After that first year, we said, “Well, we shouldn’t be part of this co-op system.  We should be a research center.”  So I spent another year helping organize the California Research Center with all of these field units in it from Fish and Wildlife Service and the Park Service.

              The following year, they rolled the National Biological Service into the U.S. Geological Survey where it became a fourth division of USGS.  They already had divisions for mapping, water resources, and geology.  We added biological resource to the USGS.  So now we’ve got a fledgling bureaucracy in the NBS that needs to be wedded, a shotgun wedding, with the USGS, that has these three stovepipe parts of their organization that hardly talk to each other.  They have different regions in the different divisions at USGS.  I mean, talk about dissimilar dysfunctional family and communication problems.  They had three different e-mail systems running in parallel with different software.  They had to go out to the Internet to talk to each other.  If you wanted to send something from geology to mapping or to water, water was state-based and geology—oh, it was unbelievable.  I spent two years working on the transition team, trying to put together a better organization at USGS.  So I lost five years of science and research and support to Parks, largely, because of that reorganization.

  Louter:  You mean your five years in the NBS was spent on trying—

  Davis:  Yes, doing those kinds of things, trying to reorganize stuff, and I continued with the research we were trying to do here, and what we ended up, when we created the California Science Center, was that places like Channel Islands Park or Yosemite or Sequoia became field stations.  So I was then a field station director.  We have one other research scientist here, Kathryn McEachern, so she’s doing plant ecology.  So, ostensibly, eventually I was going to end up supervising her, but we were both under research-grade evaluation, so as I was saying earlier, really, that’s where your professional guidance comes from.

              So, I spent, yes, a lot of time doing that, a lot less time working on analysis and synthesis of the information that we were developing, the park monitoring programs and doing a lot of things that the parks needed to have done.  I completely missed all of the wonderful experiences people had with the Park Service reorganization, because I was so busy with the various NBS and USGS nonsense.

              One of the things that happened early on was one of the former Fish and Wildlife Service people, Doug Buffington, became a regional director for USGS in the Pacific West.  He’s in your office building in Seattle, or was.  He’s retired now.  But he was the director of research for Fish and Wildlife, formerly.  It was his empire, his organization, that got destroyed and moved.  He was very unhappy about that.  He was an interesting guy.

              One of the things that happened is NOAA decided to do a review of all of their science programs.  They were having a lot of problems.  So they had the Weather Service, they had the Fishery Service, they had an Atmospheric Research Group.  I’ve forgotten now all the details, but they’ve got thousands of research scientists all over the country in various kinds of centers, Boulder, Colorado; the Hurricane Center in Miami; and all the fishery places.  They needed a review done.  They hired a consulting firm to do that, and they needed to have a steering committee, an advisory board, essentially, made up of government and university people, so Doug asked me to be the Department of Interior representative on that NOAA science review.  Well, that meant visiting most of the NOAA research sites and doing site visits and interviewing their center directors and their principal investigators, and finding out what they were doing and why they were doing it and what they thought they ought to be doing, you know, the stuff that goes into their performance evaluation of a facility and the sort of a program made up of all of those people.

              I spent two years doing that, and I got more frequent flyer miles than I knew existed.  I spent those two years on the road, doing all of that, in the midst of—and when I wasn’t doing that, then we were working on the other organizational things.  Traveled too much, ate too much, drank too much.  Those were hard years.  So I really wanted to come back to the Park Service.  Those were all interesting things, interesting opportunities, but it was taking me away from the science I wanted to do, becoming a bureaucrat in a system that I really didn’t care very much about.  And I was struggling all of the time.  The reason I stayed with it is I kept trying to figure out how we were going to provide better science to parks.  That was the goal all along, and everybody agreed that was the goal.  But, boy, that was a struggle.

              I felt that we’d left the Park Service without receptors, without people to ask the right questions, to come to the meetings and ask for things.  As you were saying earlier, you know, the powers being at the table, right?  Well, the Park Service didn’t have anybody at the table.  They didn’t have anybody to send to the table, and we had just barely, just with those 150 research scientists, gotten a few people to attend some of the meetings.  So we were starting to be a player, and then all those people are off on another team.  So I felt very strongly that NPS needed to restore that, so I worked long and hard to fix that.

              In this region, the solution was decided we’ll hire these people called science advisors.  We decided to call them science advisors because the secretary had said, “I don’t want you backfilling and hiring more research people.  Park Service has the capacity to do that,” he said.  Finally, we talked him into saying, “Well, look, if park superintendents are willing to give up money and positions to hire scientists, that’s okay.  But I don’t want the regional offices doing it, I don’t want the Washington office doing it.”  So if park superintendents were willing to do that, with a little assistance from the regional office, they could do that.  And to get around the idea or the perception that they were going to be doing research, we said, “The president has a science advisor.  Mr. Secretary, you have a science advisor.  Shouldn’t the park superintendent be able to have a science advisor?”  That was the origin of that, and it was the excuse.  Then we started hiring folks that now comprise the Regional Science Council.

  Louter:  That was ’97 or earlier than that?

  Davis:  Yes, along about that.  I’d have to look at whatever is in the CV about dates and times, but ’97 sounds right, because it seems to me I spent the five years doing the organizational stuff.

  Louter:  It took five years to get to the point where you came up with the idea of science advisors?

  Davis:  Yes, and support within the Park Service, that that was the best solution.  You know, there was a fair amount of denial in the Park Service in ’92 and ’93 when all of that was coming about, and there was a feeling if we could just get to the Secretary and talk to him, that he’d change his mind, that this will all go away, that the Congress will abolish this.  All of these things were going on, and the Park Service was undergoing its own reorganization, so that was quite a distraction for a lot of the senior leaders of the National Park Service.  They had a lot bigger problems to work on than simply trying to figure out where those 150 research scientists went, why they weren’t hearing from them as often.  So a lot of things were going on.

  Louter:  Those were busy, interesting times.

  Davis:  Yes.  Somewhat turbulent at times.

  Louter:  Speaking of being at the table, somebody once said, “All we’re trying to do is have a conversation about environmental history or historic research or science and research.”  I mean, like that was the whole point of having somebody go to the meetings, is that it’s just part of the continuing dialogue, even if you weren’t the producer of the research material, that you had someone there at the very least to be part of that discussion, contribute to the discussion, bring some of the information back to [unclear].

  Davis:  Or at least somebody had read the products and could think about them.  Yes.

  Louter:  It seems like that sort of characterizes a little bit of what the reorganization caused in the agency, because we were left just with people who could attend meetings or have these conversations and keep the dialogue open, and we had lost the workforce.

  Davis:  Yes, the capacity to do work.  Yes, but the NPS wouldn’t have the capacity to contribute to or guide the process.  I know most of the players who were involved in the thoughts about the reorganization, but I was on another team at that point.  I think that it was not a bad concept, but I think that it was poorly organized from a functional point of view.  The park clusters were administrative, and they needed to be functional.  It needed to be  tied better to the mission.  In my view, that’s why I think the vital signs monitoring networks are more functional and are working better, because they’re tied together ecologically or in themes that fit together.  They share things.  It wasn’t just, “Well, you can have one contracting officer for these six parks.”  It was, “You’re doing the same kinds of work.”

  Louter:  Yes, sort of what’s going on.

  Davis:  Sort of.  It’s far from over.  In fact, it’s never over.  That’s one of the lessons.  It just keeps moving.  It’s a whole dynamic thing.  Everybody keeps looking for a better way to do the business.

  Louter:  Except, you know, it seems a lot like a shell game, because you’re trying to cover one thing, and then you look around, there’s nobody left [unclear].  “Okay, well, then we’ve got to do that [unclear].”  [unclear] shell game.

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  It’s not always that way, but I think it can feel that way.

  Davis:  Yes, it can feel that way.  I think that it really is that way sometimes, and that’s why the role of leadership is to say, “Wait a minute.  Time out.  We’re not going to just keep moving the shells around.  I want to stop doing some things so we can do these other things well, rather than trying to cover the bases and just move the shells around so that it looks like we’ve covered all the bases.  The fact of the matter is we’re not doing anything well.”  You have to find a way to focus the organization to do a few things well, and then you can build on that confidence and on the capacity to do that work.  And I see that happening.  I see people trying to do that and trying to make those decisions.  But that is the hard business, because we’ve always done all of these things, so letting go of that when our capacity to do the work has been diminished is really difficult.  Never hard to figure out what other things would you like to do.  If somebody gives you new resources and more people, that’s easy.  But trying to decide what not to do is really difficult.

  Louter:  Do less is what some people have said.

  Davis:  Yes, well, you do have to do less, but it’s a challenge for the Park Service, because you’re stuck with the 390 properties, and not keeping them all open really isn’t an option.  You’ve got to meet the expectations of the public in the National Park System.

  Louter:  You have to reshape some of that expectation and then we have a responsibility for fulfilling the visitor experience.

  Davis:  Yes, that’s right.

  Louter:  The science advisors.  So you came on as a science advisor in ’97.

  Davis:  Yes.  Hard to believe that was ten years ago.

  Louter:  How did that function originally?  Was this when Jim Shevock was the Regional Chief Scientist—was he around then?

  Davis:  No.

  Louter:  So it was you and Dave Graber were the first two?

  Davis:  First two science advisors, yes.

  Louter:  And both you and Graber had been—

  Davis:  We had been research scientists in earlier systems.

  Louter:  And had moved out?

  Davis:  Out to NBS, that’s right.

  Louter:  NBS for that period of time and then were brought back in.

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  Dave was only stationed out of Sequoia?

  Davis:  Yes, he came from Berkeley and he did his dissertation work on bears at Yosemite, and so it was an easy transition to do.  They had the same bear issues at Sequoia.  So he came on as a research scientist there, working with David Parsons who was a forest ecologist from Stanford.  That made a nice pairing, Berkeley and Stanford together, neither one of them reticent about their approach to things.  But, yes, it was hybrid vigor, without a doubt.  Jan van Wagtendonk was at Yosemite.

  Louter:  He was brought back in too?

  Davis:  No, he was not brought back in.  He’s still with USGS.  Lloyd Loope at Haleakala is still with USGS too.

  Louter:  And they’re stationed at the park, at the field station?

  Davis:  Yes, he’s still at Haleakala.  David Graber and I are the only two who were research scientists with the Park Service who have come back from USGS to the Park Service as science advisors in the region.  Everybody else came another route.  We didn’t necessarily identify that we wanted everybody back.  It was just “We need to have science leadership in the region, so let’s figure out how to do that and how do you get individual parks to commit positions and money to do that.”

  Louter:  So what were some of the activities during that time, I guess?  You have like the first five years, so ’97 to 2001 when you were science advisor here.

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  Were you focused mostly on park-based activities, or was it sort of like the way it is now, where 20 percent of your time was dedicated to regional activities?

  Davis:  I probably spent more of my time on regional and national issues, mostly having to do with the Natural Resource Challenge and with the development of the Vital Signs Monitoring Program, because I had been so heavily involved in the development of the monitoring program here.  In fact, in some ways the development of the national Vital Signs Program was a device for funding the program here, but that’s a story we can tell.  Well, I can tell it now, if you want.

  Louter:  Yes.

  Davis:  The Vital Signs Monitoring Program was based on my experiences with Bill Robertson in South Florida on the value of long-term data sets, of long-term understanding of populations and ecosystems that came from his fire ecology, from his wading-bird research, from his sooty tern colony studies at Dry Tortugas. Bill started banding thirty or forty thousand sooty terns every year at the Dry Tortugas in the 1950s.  He was extending a project that had begun in the 1930s that had been banding a few thousand birds each year.

              Turns out these sooty terns are long-lived seabirds.  They live thirty, thirty-five years, they mate for life, they come back to the same plot of ground on a little sandy island at the Tortugas every year, and there are family groups.  There are neighborhoods that are built around the stability of this behavior.  The adult birds come into the colony in the wintertime, fly over it for a few weeks, and then start landing, and then lay eggs, hatch the eggs, fledge the young birds, and when the young birds are able to feed themselves, the adults leave and the young stay in the colony for another couple of months.

              At the end of the summer, the young birds go to West Africa.  The adult birds have already left, and they’ve gone into the South Atlantic.  These are oceanic birds.  When they’re not in the colony, they never land.  They fly all the time.  They don’t even dive to catch fish.  They catch small fish that are frightened above the surface by tunas and big fish below them.  It’s a very tenuous kind of existence.  They eat juvenile blue fin tuna, things of that sort.

              Bill extended the studies to learn all of those things.  After five years, four or five years, the young birds come back from West Africa into the colony at the Tortugas.  That’s all hard-wired into them, about where to go and how to live without the adults.  When they reach maturity, they come back to the colony.  If there’s room in the colony—its space is limited.  If there’s room in the colony, the young birds will land near their parents, find a mate that will last for life, and begin reproduction.  If the colony is so crowded there’s no room for another territory, another nest territory, only a meter square, if there’s no room, then the young birds just fly around the colony, go out and feed with the adults and come back.  But they just fly around, and as space opens up, they come in and compete for that space.

              This tern colony provided an early warning that tuna populations in the North Atlantic were under stress, because twenty years before these big adult tunas began to disappear of old age or they weren’t being replaced because they were being caught in fisheries, the little guys (juveniles) had disappeared from the food of the sooty terns.  There was this forty-year period of looking at population dynamics and the food habits of these birds that provided that kind of an early warning.

              Anyway, I really got off the track on that.

  Louter:  [unclear] vital sign, though.

  Davis:  It was a vital sign, and it was long-term.  It wasn’t year to year.  If we only did a three-year study of the terns, you would never find out all those things that I just told you.  All they knew was that there were 100,000 of these birds that showed up at the Tortugas every year, and they nested.  But Bill’s studies elucidated things that you wouldn’t find any other way.

              I did a map of the coral reef at the Tortugas in the mid seventies, following a map that Alexander Agassiz had done in 1888, so I had almost a hundred years between the two maps, and they were really different maps.  What he mapped were little tiny patches of corals, scattered all over.

  Louter:  This is the Agassiz?

  Davis:  It was Agassiz’s son, Louis’ son.

  Louter:  Louis Agassiz?

  Davis:  Yes, Alexander.  When I mapped it, corals were these huge expanses of reef, continuous live corals.  I thought, boy, the reef has really changed.  I finished that map in the summer of 1976, and in January of ’77 on the twenty-first, it snowed in Miami.  There was a cold front that moved across the Gulf of Mexico off the North American continent, and water temperatures in Biscayne Bay, which is very shallow, two meters deep, sea temperatures changed, dropped 10 to 12 degrees Centigrade overnight, killed half of the lobsters in the bay.  So it was a major extreme event.  A cold water mass in the northern Gulf of Mexico was entrained.  The water there, it swirls all over the ocean, but it swirls in that relatively shallow water off of New Orleans, and it works its way down the west coast of Florida.

              So in early February, about a week or ten days after the cold snap moved across, this mass of cold water moved across the reef at the Dry Tortugas, and, again, it dropped the water temperatures to 12 to 14 degrees Centigrade for about four hours, and it killed 90 percent of the branching corals.  The massive corals, because of their mass, their surface-to-volume ratio is such that they sustained their temperature above critical levels, but the branching corals were like radiators.  They cooled and it killed them.

              So in the summer of ’77, the reef looked just like it did when Agassiz mapped it in 1888.  I said, “Holy cow.  We’re not going to understand how these reef things work by looking at them for two years or year to year.  We’re going to have to wait for a while.”  The reef is just now beginning to recover from the 1977 event.  So here we are, thirty years later, and the corals are just starting to recover.  I would predict that if we don’t do other bad things that destroy corals, in another seventy years you’ll see a reef very similar to the one I saw in 1976.

              So I began to appreciate this long-term view of things and the value of that perspective.  I had inherited a fishery monitoring, a fishery landings data set that was started at Everglades in the late fifties, 1957.  So I’m there in the early seventies, coming on twenty years later, and so I was improving on that and adding to it and extending it, with a view toward looking at the effects of fishing on coastal marine ecosystems.  We knew the fresh water that was coming through the Everglades had a big impact.  We’re also interested in what are the effects of removing the big predators or removing some of the food sources for alligators and crocodile and eagles, the mullet fishery.

              So that was a primary interest of the Park Service, and I had this twenty-year data set when I was done and began analyzing it, and we were eliminating commercial fishing because of its impacts on recreational fishing, not because of its impacts on nature.  We needed those big long data sets to make that effective.

              So when I came to Channel Islands, I came alone. I didn’t want to manage a program of fifty people, and I wanted to work with the other people at the table from the other agencies, and collectively develop a long-term view of how this system functions.  We can’t do it with a series of three-year studies on meter-square plots.  I need to look at larger areas over longer periods of time.  That led us to the development of a Vital Signs Program that had lots of partners from other agencies helping us design the program.

  Louter:  So were you able to use the research or the data that other agencies had that was longer and went back farther than the data you had?

  Davis:  In California?

  Louter:  Yes, or in—

  Davis:  There wasn’t much.  It turns out that people have always just—I mean, you think people want to do research and think it’s expensive and that it’s a luxury.  The idea of doing long-term monitoring that’s not specifically research for a hypothesis-driven question, it’s even harder to get money for long-term monitoring that’s related to management activities when you don’t know what the value of that might turn out to be.  In fact, when I came here, I came with that background, with that interest, with the legislation in the Channel Islands enabling legislation, said that we were to do an inventory of all the plants and animals in the park, including their population dynamics, changes over time.  That’s the sentence that I was able to get written into that legislation.  I couldn’t get “monitoring.”  The committees wouldn’t buy it.  They wouldn’t fund it.  But I could do this inventory of things that had to be repeated for ten years.  So I included this business about population dynamics, and that allowed us to leverage into a monitoring program.

              When I came here, Lloyd Loope and I left Everglades at the same time.  He went to Haleakala National Park and I came here, and we went to our first annual meeting of the research scientists in the western region at Redwood.  It’s kind of like new faculty, a new seminar on what is it you’re going to do, what have you been doing, who are you, what are you going to do here?  I gave a brief synopsis of what I’d been doing for ten years in South Florida and said I was going to design a long-term monitoring program to support park management and to change the fishing policies here at Channel Islands to restore the integrity of kelp forest systems.  I got no support within the research scientists.  They said, “Oh, monitoring programs?  That’s not research.  That’s not what we do.  It’s not important.  Parks can’t afford it.  Parks don’t need it.”  It was an uphill battle to get a monitoring program started outside of Channel Islands, and the superintendent, Ehorn, wanted that information.  He agreed with me that the way we improved stewardship was to provide the evidence from the science in collaboration with the Department of Fish and Game and the universities.  That’s how we were going to win.

              So it was an uphill battle from the beginning.  Our agreement was in the regional office, I will do the research to design the monitoring program, to get it in place, to get the monitoring protocols published, so you know how to do it, with recommendations about how to implement it and make it go.  The superintendent’s part of the bargain was to get the money and the positions to get the monitoring program in place.

              So I set about conducting a series of thirteen or fourteen research projects to design monitoring programs in three years on how to do seabirds and five years on kelp.  I conducted the kelp forest piece of it, but got other people and other agencies and found funding from various sources in the Park Service and other agencies. I got NOAA Fisheries to help us with the marine mammal work.  Got lots of people.  We did everything from private vendors as contractors, to university cooperative agreements, lots of different ways to get the work done.  But we did all of that.

              By 1987, we’d finished all of the monitoring design studies and protocols, and I was trying to figure out how we were going to institutionalize it.  Ehorn had spent all of this time, and it was his call and his priority, to acquire Santa Rosa Island.  So he’d spent all of his time looking for money to buy the island, not to fund the monitoring program, and we all agreed we wanted to do it.  It’s just a matter of couldn’t do everything, so he bought Santa Rosa Island and began to negotiate to buy the east end of Santa Cruz Island.

              So I came to the end of this thing and said, “Well, we’ve designed this thing.  Now there’s no money for it.”  Superintendent is fully engaged in trying to buy the land, doing land protection plans and that kind of stuff.  So I said, “Well, I’m not going to have that all wasted.  I need to go find the funding now to make this happen.”  By then, we had convinced the Park Service that vital signs monitoring was a legitimate activity.  There were a couple of other parks, Shenandoah, in particular, also had some people who understood the value of the long-term things, and they said, “Yeah, we’re going to do this out of park money.”  So they had designed a monitoring program.

              So Channel Islands and Shenandoah were working in that direction, and we got a couple of regional directors on board, said, “We need to do something,” and we’d gotten $600,000 a year put into the Washington office budget for long-term monitoring.  We were trying to figure out how to grow that into something that would support a program here.  We estimated it would require $820-some-thousand-dollars a year for the monitoring program at this park.  So here we are, trying to take care of 250, 260 parks with $600,000.  We need $800,000 for this one park.  We estimated over 20 million dollars to do the whole park system.

              So here we are with $600,000.  How do we parlay that into enough money for the whole program?  And, of course, my objective was, in the beginning, simply to find funding for the Channel Islands program.  But we said, “One of the things we can do is say we all need this, right?  So let’s make a big program and we’ll call this the prototype.  We’ll do it first, along with Shenandoah.”  Eventually, we got a task force started and a steering committee and said, “Yeah, let’s do ten pilot programs to demonstrate the value and feasibility of monitoring programs.  Let’s provide some experiences of how it’s been done in other places.  Let’s go look at long-term data sets and show how they’ve been useful.”  And that became the ecosystem management book that Bill Halvorson and I did.

  Louter:  Science and Ecology Management?

  Davis:  Yes.  The purpose of that was simply to gather together a dozen examples of the application of long-term studies, long-term data sets, to park management issues, to say, “Okay, there’s some confidence there.  There’s reason to believe if we invest in these long-term things that it will pay dividends, and we’ll do these ten prototype programs in different biomes.”  Because part of the science discussion at that point, those who were willing to go along with it by this time, was that “The approach that you took on the coastal islands was fine, but it might be really different; in fact, it was likely to be very different than the approach you would take in the Arizona deserts or in the Sierra Mountains or in the Cascades or in Alaska or in a deciduous forest in the East.  So let’s try it in each of those biomes.”  So we had ten that became eleven prototype programs to test the concepts.

              Three times earlier in my NPS career we had tried to do basic inventories of natural resources in the park system and failed every time.  One time it was called resource basic inventories, RBIs.  Dick [Sellars] did a good job of covering that.  But we’d been down that road before, and we could never sell the inventories because they’re not dynamic.  They’re not what the parks need.  They’re the foundation you have to have, but in and of themselves, were not the end.  They were a means to an end, which was understanding how the system worked, how it responded to stresses.  So we said, “This is another opportunity to get the inventories done.”

  Louter:  Is that like that all-taxa survey they do now?

  Davis:  Well, yes, the same concept.  Same concept.  But what we did in the Natural Resource Challenge was an inventory and monitoring program.  We defined twelve resource inventories that needed to be done for every park: a vegetation map, a list of plants, a list of animals.  In fact, we only did vertebrate animals and vascular plants.  We didn’t do the algae.  We didn’t do the invertebrates.  The geology, the soils.  So we had a list of twelve, of air quality, of water quality, a list of these twelve inventories of natural resources in parks.

              The all-taxa, take the biology part and go another step and say, “We’re going to find everything, all of the living forms that are in this park,” and that may very well be one of the legacies of the Centennial Challenge, is that we get a better job, we extend the vascular plant and vertebrate animal inventories.

  Louter:  Isn’t one of the issues with these inventory programs that there’s so much inventory in the natural realm that it’s virtually like everything under the sun?

  Davis:  Yes, could be, yes.  That was the idea, was what have you got in this park, right?  And we tend to focus on the big stuff.  We don’t want to look at the bacteria, but that’s what the all-taxa thing does.  It looks at everything.

  Louter:  Because we were trying to write a history that would support the all-taxa survey of a place like Tomales Bay at Point Reyes, so at least you would have an understanding of what historical events occurred here that would have manipulated or altered the natural system, set some context for that.  Then I talked to other folks who say, “Well, you guys in the cultural world have it easier, because at least you’ve got some mandates about what you’re supposed to look at, or some law that says go look at these historic resources.”  But in the natural world, if we’re not careful, it’s like we’re down at the smallest level, looking at the smallest division of plants and their divisions and everything else.

  Davis:  Well, generally, the all-taxa thing will stop at a species level, but sometimes they’ll go to subspecies or races or they’ll get into the real minutia.  But largely it’s an attempt to take that biological piece and go even further.  It was really a way to engage the local community and connect people to nature again, to get them excited about what was there, and because it has very high diversity in the Smokies, they did that.  Then Don glommed onto that and said this is a really good idea and it does engage people, and it brought in a lot of money, a lot of people to do the work.  But that was the foundation.  So the monitoring program was really where we were headed.  We did the examples for the book and said, “There’s a good reason to believe this will work, and the inventories are the foundations.  So let’s begin with the inventories, and we’ll turn the inventory money into monitoring money as we complete the inventories.”

  Louter:  Where did the book come in terms of its publication and Challenge?

  Davis:  It was pre-Challenge.  It was part of the foundation.  We made two runs at the Challenge to get the funding going, and the first time, we failed, and the second time, we picked it up and carried it forward further.  The monitoring and inventory were two of twelve parts that were twelve programs that were identified in the Natural Resource Challenge, and they were the lion’s share of it.

              We also had a section on water resources and a section on air resources, and an important part of both air and water were monitoring programs.  It was a way of subdividing.  If you just put monitoring and said, “Well, this is going to be $46 of the $100 million, 46 million of 100 million,” it wasn’t going to go anywhere.  Everybody wanted to have a little piece of their own thing in it, so we took some of that and put it in water and some of it in air, and some of it was everything else, and it became the Vital Signs Monitoring Program, which was preceded by inventories.

              So the initial strategy was, we’ll take so much money and put it up front into these inventories, and from those inventories we’ll create menus from which we select vital signs that will be monitored.  And having completed those inventories, then we’ll be able to roll that money into more monitoring down the road, and that’s what will serve the parks in the long term.

  Louter:  Were the parks ready?  Did they know what things they needed to look at?  Sort of like, “This is what we need to do, but we already know what the inventory is, so we’re going to skip to the monitoring”?

  Davis:  Yes, there were a lot of places where they already had satisfactory inventories in order to make those decisions, and that was my position all along, was that largely we knew that.  Here at Channel Islands we’d looked at it carefully and we broke things into taxonomic groups.  We didn’t know enough about the lizards and snakes, and we didn’t know enough about insects, the terrestrial invertebrates, to make decisions, but for everything else, we did.  So we proceeded to make decisions about what we thought Vital Signs would be, and in those two groups we had to go do field surveys, inventories, to figure out what was there and make some decisions.  That was largely true about most parks.  We had a pretty good idea what was there, and we could move forward with making decisions, that we didn’t need to spend the time on the inventories.

              I had been so burned out earlier I was skeptical of inventories.  In the sixties, there was an international group—I don’t know if I still have the books or not—that tried to do, basically, an all-taxa inventory.  International Biophysical Program, IBP.  It was an IUCN-based thing that came out of Europe, and they had these published books, maybe eight or ten of them, with protocols for doing the surveys and how you should report all the information.  It was a great idea.  Conceptually it was wonderful, but it was just so expensive to implement that nobody could do it.

  Louter:  IUCN?

  Davis:  IUCN, International Union for the Conservation of Nature.  That happened when I was in the Virgin Islands.  That was one of the things that landed on my desk were these handbooks on how to do this stuff, and I looked at them and said, “I can’t do this.”  We wanted to do it, but there was no way we were going to implement that.

  Louter:  I demonstrate my lack of knowledge here, but inventorying seems to be pretty basic to ecology, right?

  Davis:  Yes.  It’s very fundamental.  But you need taxonomists who can identify all the stuff.  You go collect it all.  Even to know where to look to find the stuff is a challenge, and there are taxonomic specialists.  In some of these cases, there may be only two or three people in the United States or in the world that can actually identify all these things, and that’s one of the failings, one of the things that we’re missing right now in biology is taxonomists.  We’ve gone into the molecular world and we’ve lost the natural history side.  We’ve lost the ability just to grab a handful of plants and identify all of them.

  Louter:  What’s that great quote that [unclear]?  He was describing the West as a place where the plants have no Latin names, is sort of his description of the frontier, the undiscovered country.  That was his contribution, and he was going to stay in the lab, do some fieldwork but stay there and describe things and do the taxonomy.

  Davis:  It’s fundamental, and if you can’t tell the players, you’ve got to have a program, and we’re missing that and we’re losing them.  Many of the best taxonomists are elderly and are passing on, and that’s not been the fancy forefront of science, and so we’re going to lose those people and their capacity.  I don’t know quite how we’re going to replace that.  So one of the things we’re trying to do with ATBI is all-taxa things, is to encourage and support the study of taxonomy.  We need that skill.  It’s one of the park’s way of saying, “Well, we have an opportunity.  We can put you to work if you’ll train taxonomists and we can use them here.  They have value.”  So a little bit of parks for science, and  little bit of science for the parks; interaction.

  Louter:  [unclear] should have been done.  It’s just maybe to reinforce the fact that this is the type of basic science, this is the type of research, that the program should be doing.  Not that inventory is always a definition of what ecology or ecosystem management is that this is what we do.  This is fundamental.

  Davis:  Yes, it’s fundamental to doing those things.

  Louter:  But we haven’t been doing it.

  Davis:  “No, NPS said we’ll just skip ahead.  We don’t really need all of that.”

  Louter:  I mean, because it seems so much like we’re stating the obvious, but the obvious thing is that we need to go out and do research and document.

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  “What do you do for a living?”  “Well, I inventory and document X, Y, and Z.”  “Really?  Why is that important?”  “Well, without that information, we don’t know what we have and we can’t monitor it for the long-term.”  See, ecologists and historians have a lot in common.

  Davis:  We do.  We do.

  Louter:  So the Challenge, was it based on the program that had been going on here?  Or was this the prototype?

  Davis:  The prototype for the monitoring program, and we were trying to figure out how we could fund the monitoring programs and move that up to the next level, and so our strategy was this three-pronged effort of confidence that we knew what we were doing from the examples in the past, that we had the prototype programs that we were doing, and we would do the inventory.  So we were trying to move those three things forward.  Over a ten-year period, we would build from the $600,000 up to $10 million, and so if we added a million dollars each year, that we would get to where we were going and we would fund these eleven prototype programs.  We would conduct the inventories.  We’d roll the inventory money into the next prototype program.  At the end of ten years, we would have eleven functioning prototype programs, we’d have the book in place, people could see the examples, we’d have inventories, we’d be prepared to move forward, and we could tell the Congress that the Park Service was confident they could go forward through Interior, that we know how to do this.  This is important for us, and all we need now is the money, and we’ve demonstrated our abilities.  Right?

              That was our strategy, and we started down that path and we got several million dollars to fund four of the prototype programs and to organize the other six or seven and kind of get them lined up for funding and start a little bit of the inventory stuff.  We got the book done.  I mean, that was only a few thousand dollars.  That was relatively easy to do.

              We did a series of workshops.  We did one big workshop here.  We put out a call to superintendents, resource managers, scientists, all over the Park Service, said, “What are the issues that have been addressed by long-term data sets?  Get me your examples.  Get me a one-paragraph description, abstract thing, that talks about that.  We want to pick a few, a handful of the very best ones to make this case.”

              So we got about a hundred nominations, and we convened twenty-some senior folks, scientists and managers, from all over the country to come here, and each of them would take a couple of those, three or four of those, and make presentations to the larger group about this particular case, and then the group would decide what those dozen were going to be.  Then we had to pick the twelve or so, fourteen of them, and said, “All right.  Now we need authors for these that really know the cases,” and got them to write their chapters, then put all that together and then went out and found a publisher and moved that forward.  But, yes, that was thousands of dollars, not millions of dollars.  It was relatively easy to do.  It took us a couple of years to get it all together.

              But it engaged those people in the process.  It wasn’t like we just arrived down from the mountain with the tablets and said, “Well, here they are.”  Everybody was involved and got a chance to put their best foot forward, and it got them to think from the very beginning, “Well, how have we used that information or how would we use that information?”  And it got buy-in from people who had previously not really been enthusiastic supporters of science, but somehow we managed to engage them in that process.

  Louter:  Why weren’t people enthusiastic supporters of science?

  Davis:  I think in large part because they were doing almost as well by the seat of their pants as they were by the kinds of science they were able to afford or develop in the 1960s and seventies.  I think, bottom line, that’s it.  It’s not that they were unbelievers or that they were bad people; it was just that their personal experience at managing parks didn’t require that they invest in the science.  Conditions were less acute in parks than they have become in the last twenty-five years, and they were able to get away with that, and we didn’t have the monitoring to evaluate whether or not the policy worked or didn’t.  Wasn’t something that we did.  We weren’t using science as a performance measure.  Those things have changed or are changing.

  Louter:  That’s interesting.  So—

  Davis:  So we made a run at that.  That’s when Abby Miller came on the scene with Gene Hester.  Gene Hester brought her over from the Fish and Wildlife Service when he became associate director, essentially the chief scientist of the Park Service.  The chief scientist position morphed into becoming the associate director for natural resources and science.

  Louter:  The position that Mike—

  Davis:  Mike Soukup is in now.

  Louter:  Was Mike heading up the Challenge, or did he inherit the Challenge?

  Davis:  No, no.  He created it.  He created it.  He packaged it and marketed it.  He knew what was important and what wasn’t.  The NLC recognized that there was a problem.  Mike had brought to the NLC, along with Bob Barbee regional director in Alaska, and Stan Albright in the West and Pacific West, John Reynolds who was in a variety of roles at Denver Service Center and as deputy director. But as deputy director, he and Stan and Bob Barbee were real champions of “We need to do something different, guys.  If we want a different outcome than we’re getting now, and take care of parks, we need to do something differently.  What is it?”

              The first shot at that, they described it.  The NLC wrestled with it for a day and a half at one of their meetings, said, “What we need to do is change the culture of the National Park Service to accept science,” so, basically, the question you just asked about why aren’t we using science.

  Louter:  That’s the age-old question, right?

  Davis:  Yes.  Dick [Sellars] was well into the book by then, and people were seeing chapters and talking to Dick, and he was talking to people.  We knew it was coming soon, and so there was a feeling, well, we’re going to change the culture.  And they couldn’t resolve it.  They just couldn’t figure out how to go about doing it.  They said, “But if we got smart people together in a room, we know that that could be done. We’re just not smart enough.”  They were being falsely modest, I think.  They were really bright people.  They’re good people.  They knew the Park Service.

              But each of the regional directors and each of the associates appointed a representative, they formed yet another committee, and went back and met for a day and a half in Washington.  I served as the western region representative and chaired the group.  One of the questions we had from one of the regions was, “What are we fixing?  There’s nothing broken.”  That was a real eye-opener for me.  I thought we were at least all on the same page, from what I had heard from John Reynolds and others.

              So we struggled with that for a while, but kind of came up with where we thought we were headed and what we thought the issues were and how we thought we might move in that direction.  So we developed a draft report that I worked on very hard for a couple of days and sent it out to the group, got the comments back, and then we sent it in to Washington and went back to have a briefing for the director.  It was an interesting time, and I was doing entirely too many things.

              I took the red eye from San Francisco back to meet with the director, so when I arrived in D.C. at six o’clock in the morning for a nine-thirty or ten o’clock meeting with the director for a briefing, I went in the briefing room and there were fifty people in the room.  I never spoke to the director.  We did, collectively did, a presentation.

  Louter:  Fifty people did a presentation?

  Davis:  Yes, about what they thought was important.  And the version of the report that had gone to the director was so different than the one that our group that I chaired had submitted, I hardly recognized it.  It had been edited.  Things that we had said were very important were no longer even on the list of things that we thought ought to be done, and other things were in their place.  Things that we had explicitly rejected as bad ideas were now back on the list again.

              I took that copy with me on the plane, and on the way home I was way too tired.  Now I’d been up for God knows how many hours, and I wrote an e-mail message about how this was just unacceptable, this was unethical that this report still had our names on it, and yet had all this stuff in it that we had rejected and our best ideas were missing from it.  I was pissed, and I sent that out.  That was the end of that work group.  [laughs]

              John Reynolds said to me, he says, “Well, I’ve done that.  I’ve sent those messages off without thinking too.  I’ll bet you’re sorry you pushed that send button,” and until he said that, I wasn’t.  But I realized what I had done at that point.  I had just destroyed that whole effort.  It was not going to move forward as a result.

              But out of the ashes of that horrible conflagration, Mike Soukup and Abby Miller picked it up and created, with Loran Fraser, created the Natural Resource Challenge and eventually got Deny Galvin on board in that deathbed conversion I’m sure you heard about.

  Louter:  He’s the one who knows how to work the system.

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  But he wasn’t a big supporter of it?

  Davis:  No.  But once he got it, he was sitting at the NLC meeting, I think they were in Yellowstone, and he, classic back-of-the-envelope kind of thing, said, “Well, look, if this is what you want to do, this is how we do it.”  And that became the Natural Resource Challenge.  Then they formed a committee of twenty-four, twelve superintendents and twelve program specialists or scientists, and I chaired the section on monitoring, and I was one of the twelve.  We held workshops with a group of people and said, “Well, here’s what we ought to do for monitoring.  Here’s what we ought to do for water resources and the Research Learning Centers.”  Don Neubacher chaired the group on Research Learning Centers.  So we had those ideas.  We put all that together.  That became the Challenge, and that’s what moved forward and finally got traction and funding, as well as it did.  But there were a couple of false starts and some trial and error.  [laughs]

  Louter:  Well, that’s good.  I mean, not good that there was, but [unclear].

  Davis:  Well, it was a learning experience for everybody.  It certainly was for me.  That’s part of what was going on from the time I came back to the Park Service after USGS and before 2001.  That was all going on in that time period.

  Louter:  The Challenge was funded in ’99?

  Davis:  Yes.  It was rolled out in ’99.  So that first shot at it was probably ’97, ’98 is when we were going through that first iteration of trying to get all of those things together, and then by ’99 we figured out how we were going to move forward.

              But the interesting thing for me was that the challenge to our first little group that I was chairing was, “How do you change the NPS culture to adopt science?” That was the wrong approach.  You can’t change the culture.  You have to change what they do, the kinds of things that you want done, and then you bring people in to do that kind of work who have a different orientation.  They will then have a different culture.  As you move them and integrate them into the old culture, you begin to shift the culture in a sustainable way.  If you just try to change the culture of the organization, it’s either going to snap back or fall apart.  But you can begin to adjust it by bringing in people who have a different orientation, and you change the way people perceive the mission and you move things forward.

              That was the difference between that first abortive effort and what became the Natural Resource Challenge, and Deny recognized that.  He knew that “how to change the culture?”  was the wrong question.  It’s not “How do I change the culture?”  Now, he’d been in those earlier discussions and hadn’t discovered that, so it was a learning period for all of us.  I think that there were several iterations of how we perceived what the issue was and what we wanted done.  I think that many of us recognized we wanted an outcome that we could identify, which was more science, science-based decisions, ecosystem-based management.  That’s what we wanted as an outcome, and we thought we had to change the culture of the organization in order to achieve that.  All we really had to do is identify that’s where we want to go, how do we get there, identify these work elements like the inventories, the monitoring programs, the Research Learning Centers, the exotic plant management teams.  These are the basic building blocks of the Natural Resource Challenge, and if you’re going to do that kind of work, when you hire the people to do that work, you will change the culture of the organization in the process. , All because we couldn’t find the funding to do the monitoring in the Channel Islands.  [laughs]

  [Begin File 4]

  Davis:  So that’s part of our record, what we did, how the program was developed.  That’s the outcome, the Channel Islands monitoring protocols.

  Louter:  So they’re published?

  Davis:  These were published by the Park Service.  That’s what they looked like.  That’s when desktop publishing was brand new.  I’ve even forgotten the name of the program, but we actually did that.  We were so proud of ourselves that we could do that.  I hired Nancy Ehorn, who was formerly an assistant park superintendent.  She was working at the Denver Service Center when she met Bill Ehorn, and then she went to work at Santa Monica Mountains, and they got married.  He met her when she came down here (CHIS) to work on the GMP and ended up getting married, and so she was working as an assistant superintendent in Santa Monica.  Then she got tired of it; she just wanted to quit and just be with Bill.  She is really talented, and so I engaged her to publish these, actually to produce them.  So I hired Nancy, and she hired a technical editor to work with her to develop the graphics and do all that kind of stuff.  So in 1987, we worked on that, and I think we produced these in ’88.

  Louter:  So did people know how to use them?

  Davis:  Oh, yes.  Yes.  This is how we do the monitoring.  This became the model for protocols throughout the National Park System.  They’re still doing it.  They’ve, obviously, modernized them and shifted them a little bit.  They’ve become much more sophisticated, and these will get redone someday, but these are still in use.

  Louter:  Does that mean they don’t need you anymore?  They can just go out and do them?

  Davis:  That’s right.  Yes, exactly.  Well, that was the whole idea.  One of the principles of designing a long-term monitoring program is that you know you’re going to have multiple observers over periods of time.  You’re going to have lots of different people doing it, so you need to build into the sampling design techniques that are robust to observe the variability.  It can’t be based on judgments.  It has to be very objective and things that people can be trained to do reliably.  It doesn’t have to be quick or easy.  Quick and easy are always better, but effective monitoring doesn’t have to be.  But it does have to be reliable.  You have to be able to train people so when you send them out to count and measure things, it’s always the same; it doesn’t depend on who does it.  So we keep track of the observers.  That was part of the design work, was to look at the variation that was due to observers.

              So I’ve got eight people doing the same kinds of sampling at different places along the transect line.  I can come back and compare those.  They shouldn’t be significantly different.  Yes, there’s variation.  There’s variation in what they’re measuring and counting, but there shouldn’t be a consistent pattern related to “This observer always sees more fish,” or “This one never sees any little purple urchins.”  So we look for those patterns.  If there is, then we either have a problem with training or our oversight or the instructions that we’re giving, or maybe the technique’s not reliable.  Different people read it and get a different interpretation.

              So we would go back and adjust it a little bit.  We didn’t have very many problems with that, but that’s part of the design process.  That’s why there’s a research element to it.  It’s not simply a matter of, oh, lay a meter-square quadrant on the bottom and count the urchins in it.  It takes a little more than that, and you have to give them some guidance.  You lay a meter-square quadrant out, and it’s got 500 or 600 urchins in it.  If you just let people try and count it, you’ll get all kinds of variation, and some people will be really good and some people will be poor.  But if you tell them, “Divide that visually into quarters and count the upper left first, then count the upper right,” you drop a lot of the variations.  So just by the instructions that you give in the handbook and by the training, you can reduce the variances and increase the power to detect change.

  Louter:  On the monitoring program.

  Davis:  On the monitoring program.  What in the world is this?

  Louter:  A summary of the milestones, right here.  You don’t have to go through the whole thing.

  Davis:  Okay.

  Louter:  If you want to recount the development of the monitoring program here, because we talked a little bit yesterday about the monitoring program as it related to the Challenge.

  Davis:  Right.

  Louter:  But in terms of moving down to the actual program.

  Davis:  The program itself?

  Louter:  How you came to develop and design and some of the things that don’t appear in the administrative record, like what it was like going out to do it, everything from like how do you actually monitor stuff underwater, compared to what people are doing above water, or how do you design a program for the whole Channel Islands, including the marine resources and the terrestrial resources.  I thought that was pretty interesting reading through the outline.  So if there are things that you want to talk about, that would be—one thought I had as I read the first paragraph that talks about the law, a little voice went off in my head thinking, I said, “Is this the part that Gary Davis created?”

  Davis:  It’s the part, I think, that we influenced.  Clay clearly crafted it, and it went through all of the normal editing.  Like I said, this same paragraph failed in the Biscayne National Monument legislation.  Clay tried to get both in there, and the committee, the members of Congress, would not, or the senators or their staff.  I don’t know any of the details of how that came to be.  I just know that when we talked with Clay, we were trying to get this same thing in here, the inventory of the species indicating population dynamics and trends was to aim at, and do it for ten years.  In the two-year cycles of the House of Representatives, ten years is forever.  That’s as far as anybody could see or wanted to reach, so we couldn’t get them to say, “Well, you should monitor forever.”

              Now, by the time we got to 1998, the Thomas bill—is that right, ‘98?  I don’t know.  Late nineties.  By the time we got to the Thomas bill, it was “We should do this forever.  The Park Service should have a monitoring program that goes on.”  But there was a huge change in thinking between the early eighties and the late nineties.  In those 15 years, we went from, as I told you, that initial seminar that I gave to the research scientists of the western region.  It was like, “You don’t do monitoring.  It’s not research.  It’s not valuable.”  All of a sudden now the Congress is telling us, “You should have a monitoring program,” and everybody’s getting excited about it.  Now it is clearly a cornerstone of natural resources stewardship in the agency.  So in the last twenty-five, thirty years, a change in state of the way we think about those things.

  Louter:  So you showed up, had your job transferred out here.

  Davis:  Right, and these were kind of the marching orders.  This is what I used as leverage with the regional office to say, “Well, those guys at Sequoia and Arizona and other places don’t think this is important, but the law says this and the superintendent wants this because he’d lost that case in the Supreme Court, and he wants to better protect the resources, and he can’t do it with the authority he has now.  So we need to convince the State of California that they should change their policies and practices.  How do we do that?”  We need more knowledge of nature and the effects of human activities on ecosystems. That’s really what drove that, and that’s what this paragraph is about, is providing us with the moral authority to go forward and do things the Park Service had not done before.

  Louter:  So how do you show up and design a program?  Did it just happen?  Did you have it in mind when you came?

  Davis:  I had some ideas of what needed to be done from my experiences in the Virgin Islands, in South Florida, and a little bit at Lassen, but mostly from South Florida, about the value of the long-term studies that Bill Robertson had done and that I had been doing.

  Louter:  Is there a scientific term for winging it, making it up as you go along?

  Davis:  Yes.  Wild-ass guess.  WAGs, yes.  Well, you start with a conceptual model, and so that’s what you’re doing.  I’m willing to laugh about it, say, “Well, you’re guessing.”  But what you’re doing is an informed estimate, a decision that “I think this is the way this works.”  Then in science you formulate that in such a way that you can test whether or not that’s right.  And if it fails, you say, “Ah, let’s adjust our hypothesis,” which was the wild-ass guess in the beginning, right?  “We’ll adjust that and we’ll test it again.”  So it’s an iterative process of trying out these conceptual models of how nature works, and that’s what we were doing here. We were saying “We think this is how this system is put together.  We think that the major elements of that system are the seals and sea lions (pinniped populations) the seabirds, the fish, the invertebrates, and the plants that make up kelp forests, the tide pools of the rocky intertidal communities, the vegetation on the islands, the wildlife on the islands, the birds on the islands, the invertebrates on the islands.”

              So we broke it into twelve big segments like that and said, “We think those are the major pieces of this system,” and we tested that with the local regional scientific community.  We took it out to them and said, “Here’s what we think are the most important parts of this system.  What do you think?”  And we made some adjustments and kind of adjusted things a little bit and then said, “Okay.  So let’s take the seabird piece of this.  How would we measure that?”  If that’s one of the major components, how would we measure it?  There are twelve species of seabirds that reproduce in the park.  There are another forty or fifty species that feed or pass through the park that depend on the park for some part of their life cycle, so seabirds are an important part of the park ecosystem.  What do we measure?  What is going to be reliable that will give us an early warning of changes in conditions requiring intervention?  What will tell us the natural variation in the health of the system?

              Just like body temperature is quite variable.  If you have an elevated temperature, it might be because you have a bacterial infection, but it might be you just came back from a five-mile run.  There are a lot of causes.  But temperature, body temperature, is a really valuable vital sign.  So that’s what we’re seeking.  That’s what we’re looking for.  So we went to the seabird community of researchers and said, “What do you measure?  Why do you do that?  What could we measure that will meet our needs to tell us about the health of the system, long-term trends that will identify when we need to intervene and when we should just back up because it’s a natural event and everything’s okay?  It’s just normal fluctuations.”

  Louter:  In that process, were there cases where there wasn’t enough knowledge about specific species to do that?

  Davis:  Yes, and that would be one of the criteria.  Okay, the first cut was—and they agreed very quickly with seabirds.  Well, there are sixty species, but only twelve of them depend on the islands for reproduction.  So let’s focus on those twelve.  Okay?  Well, you know, there are three species of cormorants that breed on the islands, and we’d like to know about them.  They’re diving birds.  They chase fish.  The problem is, they incubate their eggs on their feet.  So they’ve got this egg, and they’re sitting on a rock cliff, straight down into the ocean, and the egg’s on their feet.  If you go into the colony, they all get up, fly away, the eggs roll off their feet into the ocean, and you’ve lost the year’s production.  Maybe we shouldn’t bother them.

              Western gulls, on the other hand, lay their eggs on flat areas.  They’re aggressive.  They will try to run you out of the colony.  They will dive-bomb you and attack you, and you can go in and pick up the chicks and weigh them, put them back in the nest, and they seem to be just fine with that.  We could learn a lot more about seabirds if we work on western gulls and we count the number of eggs that they lay, because we can go into the colony and count eggs in each nest, and we can look at how many hatch and how many don’t.  We can look at how many of those that hatch actually produce chicks that learned to fly and leave the colony, fledging.  We can look at the number of pairs that are attempting to nest.  So we can get a lot of information, and we could actually measure the chicks right after they hatch.  We can measure them a week or ten days later, and then another week or ten days, so we get a growth rate on chicks.

              They’re going to be healthier if there’s a lot of food available to them, right?  And if they’re starving to death and maybe don’t even survive, we get information that tells us about the system.  So they’re very robust and they’ll allow us to disturb them, whereas those other guys, not so much.  So we chose western gulls, brown pelicans, and other sea birds that tolerate minor disturbance.

              That’s why we went to the experts and said, “Tell us what we can do.  What’s doable?”  And if you don’t know anything about the natural history of the species, you’re not going to get as much information by monitoring that.  It’s not that it’s not important, but we’re looking for the art of the possible here, of what can we do already without extensive research?  If we already know the life history, we know what these animals eat, and we know what eats them, and we know what their breeding conditions are, what they require, we know something about the level of contaminants in their tissues, by monitoring them, we learn a great deal about the whole system.  We could pick another species nobody’s done any research on.  We don’t know where they go when they leave the islands, what they eat.  We can count them, but we don’t get as much information.

              So this was an iterative process of, let’s get the most information we can gather about ecosystems through these animals or plants and try it.  Let’s see what works.  Let’s see what we can do and see if it tells us what we need to know.  Does it give us a signal that we can detect?  Can we tell the difference between El Niño years and La Niña years, warm-water, cold-water years?  Can we see that?  If we can’t see that, what we’re measuring isn’t very sensitive.  It’s not going to be very useful.  But if we can see those kinds of major natural signals in the system, we may have just what we need to monitor ecosystem health.  Can we see the difference between species that are exploited in a fishery and those that live beside them that are not targeted by fisheries, their ecological equivalent?  Red urchins are taken in the fishery because they’re a little bit larger.  Purple urchins are not taken because, at the current economic conditions, it’s not worth processing them.  They should be about the same in the system, right?  And if they’re really different, then something’s going on, maybe related to the effects of fishing.  We should be able to detect that.  So those were the criteria that we use, and so what we’re trying to do is take our wild-ass guess, our conceptual model of the system, and test it, see how the system works.  Will it tell us what we need to know?

  Louter:  Because you’re not necessarily testing—well, you are testing for the health of a particular species, but you’re also looking to see what it indicates for the overall health of the system?

  Davis:  That’s correct, yes.  We’re using the abundance, the distribution.  Sometimes the environmental conditions change.  These species are mobile and they could just move.  So you see them move down the island chain.  Some of the things are sessile; they’re tied to the bottom, like plants are growing.  We have sessile animals, anemones and things like that, can’t move.  Even abalone or snails, they’re not moving a mile; they move tens of meters in a lifetime.  So they’re going to stay right there, and they’re going to have to take it.  They’re going to have to adapt to changing conditions other than just moving.  But distribution can tell you about some things.

              You see recruitment of juvenile California sheephead in El Niño years all the way out to San Miguel Island, but in normal years or in cold-water years, they only recruit to the warm water areas because the northern limit of their distribution is right here at Point Conception.  So they’re a warm-water species right at the edge of their range, so how they move and the recruitment of juveniles tells you a lot about environmental conditions.  As adults they just stay wherever they’ve settled as juveniles, and they’ll grow up, and they do just fine at San Miguel.  They don’t reproduce, but they grow up and live apparently normal lives as members of the kelp forest community.

              So if you were to look at the abundance of adult sheephead at San Miguel, what you will see is that at some point you say, “Okay, I’m starting here, and there are a whole bunch of them.”  And the number of adults goes down and down and down, natural mortality gets to them, and then you’ll get a recruitment event after eleven years, twelve year intervals from El Niño, and all of a sudden there are a lot more of them, because you’ve got recruitment into the population.  So the population goes back up, and then it goes down over that period of time.  So you begin to see that pattern of population change, whereas at Anacapa, the sheephead population stays at the same level because you get recruitment every year.  So those are the patterns that we’re trying to find and then look at anomalies in the patterns that indicate un healthy conditions or human impacts.

  Louter:  So you said you picked twelve groups?

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  And did you look at them all equally?

  Davis:  No.  What you could do, and we set them in priorities because we couldn’t afford to do them all in the beginning, but the pinnipeds were very important.  People like them, they see them, they were mentioned in the park’s legislation, so we set priorities on the twelve, and pinnipeds were near the top of the list.

              The number two priority was a data management system.  I argued that if we couldn’t take care of the information, there was no point in doing the monitoring.  I couldn’t make information management number one because I had no data to manage.  So I said, “Okay, pinnipeds are one.  Data management’s two.”  Three were the seabirds.  Then four, five, and six I combined into one and that was the kelp forest.  It was fish, invertebrates, and plants.  So we combined them into one system.  I divided them initially, on purpose, to kind of get some parity with the terrestrial environment, because in the terrestrial environment we had a group of experts that would work on the vegetation; another group of experts that would work on the birds; another group of experts that would work on the wildlife, on the foxes; another group that would work on the herptofauna, the lizards and the snakes and the amphibians.  So I had all those categories.

              So now I’ve got on the islands eight different design studies that need to be done, whereas in the ocean, I would look at it and say, well, I have a kelp forest system.  Right?  I’ve only got one.  So I’m competing now.  It looks administratively and emotionally, when you’re trying to market this, that there’s much more to be done on the islands.  So I said, all right, I’m going to do the same thing in the ocean that we do on land.  I’m going to say, I’ve got the fishes, kind of like the birds.  And I’ve got the plants; that’s the vegetation, right?  And I’ve got the invertebrates, like the insects, right?  So I’ve got those three groups.  So I got those three projects funded while we got birds and vegetation and mammals funded on the islands.  But when it came time to actually implement the monitoring and to go do design studies, I lumped them together, so I had a kelp forest monitoring program.

              One of the things that I learned from Everglades was how you divide the pie is important as to the outcome.  So learning how to present things was part of the success of the program, I think.

  Louter:  Was the kelp forest an obvious species to—

  Davis:  Yes, it’s an obvious community to work with, or ecosystem to work with.  It supports about a thousand species of plants and animals, of macro, the big stuff, not plankton, not bacteria, but the big things you can see with an unaided eye.  The kelp forest alters the physical environment.  The growth of the forest slows down currents and entrains larvae so they stay close to their parents; they don’t get swept away.  So it modifies the physical environment.  It is a primary producer.  It grows, as I said yesterday, a foot or two a day, so it’s really good at incorporating the nutrients out of the ocean with the sunlight, producing sugar that is stored and is used then by the rest of the community.  So it’s a source of food and shelter and it modifies the environment, so it’s a really key part of the ocean ecosystem.

  Louter:  Do they call it an indicator species?

  Davis:  Yes, you could call it an indicator species.  Keystone species is another term that is used.  But usually people who talk in those terms are zoologists, people who are talking about animals who are predators, and there’s control over the structure of the ecosystem from the top down, from the predators at the top, controlling and mediating the competition of the prey species below them in the system, and that all trickles down.  But there’s also bottom-up control about the source of nutrients and about suitable substrate.  You need a hard place for these plants to grab onto the bottom or else they get blown away.  Currents and storms will move them around.  So from the bottom up, there’s control.

              Ecologists have been exploring what’s most important or how do these two forces interact. That was one of the major findings of the twentieth century in ecology, the power of these biological interactions.  Prior to the middle of the twentieth century, most people thought plants and animals lived where they did because of the environmental conditions; it’s too cold, too hot.  You go up the mountain, forest changes, right?  That’s all physical.  What role does the biological interaction have?  Bob Payne at Friday Harbor, working with starfish and snails, said, “Oh, look.  These biological interactions are really important for biodiversity, stability, resilience in these communities,” and then people started exploring much wider examples and discovered it is a general principle of ecology.

              So that’s what we’re doing.  We’re looking top down, bottom up.  We’re looking at all the interactions in the system.  So as we design the monitoring programs, we started with the goals of the program, what do you want it to do?  I want to know the health of the system.  I want to have early warnings about things that I should do.  I want to be able to evaluate my efforts at restoration.  Will that work?

              If you spend time at the very beginning working out with all the people that are involved with the program or want to be involved or the management agencies, you spend time at the front end talking about your common goals and what you expect out of the program, then you have a chance of actually getting everybody to work together.  So we spent a fair amount of time doing that, and I worked with each of the groups, the seabird people, the pinniped people, the island vegetation folks, island mammals, island birds.  All twelve of those groups had to have that same kind of orientation, bring together various groups in workshops, or I would travel to their places and talk with them, or go to meetings where the seabird people all met, and talk to them about what it was we wanted to do.

              So there was a lot of marketing involved with getting the program started and saying, “Here are the goals that we think are important.  What do you think is important?  What kinds of research are going on?  What kinds of things are falling through the gaps?”  Because most ecological research in the mid to late twentieth century was focused on graduate-school careers and things that were doable, so they were focused on three-year studies in meter-square plots.  And you can’t learn very much about whole ecosystems and landscapes over decades when you’re looking at those short-term small micro-scale things.

              So a number of ecologists in the eighties began to recognize that and began to push for longer-term studies over larger areas.  The National Science Foundation developed something they called Long-Term Ecological Research, LTER, programs.  Forest Service had their experimental forest at Andrews.  So there are a number of groups.  NEON (National Ecological Observation Network) is the latest incarnation of that very same effort and thought about how do we institutionalize these things and how do we learn more in the long term?  How do we learn more about the power of these infrequent, rare natural extreme events, such as big droughts, storms, blizzards, cold snaps, El Niño events, decadal oscillations, the kinds of things that today we’re saying, gee, we wish we had more information so we could better interpret global change and climate connections to all these things.  And we don’t have very much of that in most places, or in enough places.

  Louter:  It seems like when we talk about climate change, there’s the assumption that there is that kind of information.

  Davis:  Well, there’s a little bit.  Look at that one record of atmospheric CO₂, measured at the top of Hawaii, is the only indication because somebody just started measuring CO₂ routinely and watched it.  Otherwise, we’d all be arguing over whether it’s actually gone up.  We never would have gotten here.  So it’s a little bit of physical information, the weather stuff, the water quality, all of the physical, chemical kind of attributes of the environment are pretty easy to measure, and they’re reliable.  They’re not as variable, because they don’t have genetics.  Each living organism is unique.  It’s different than all the other ones around it and it behaves differently.  From all of that variation at the very base of the system, with the individual organisms, you get incredible system variation.  So if you poke the physical part of an ecosystem with exactly the same kind of poke, as if you’re pushing a pool cue and balls around on a table, you hit it the same way, it does the same thing every time.  Not with biology.  You poke it, and sometimes it goes that way, sometimes they got up on the wrong side of the bed and had a fight with their wife, and they go off in the other direction.  Right?  There are all kinds of sources of variation that you can’t see, and the only way to get it is to measure it.  So the monitoring program helps us begin to measure that kind of inherent biological variability and how that interacts with the physical and chemical environment and how they react with one another.  So we needed some way of doing that.  That was really the impetus from the academic side of understanding ecosystems. From the park side we needed to be better about predicting what happens with the policies that we’ve implemented and how should we change those.

  Louter:  So setting out to do the study, to do the monitoring, you created the list of what signs or what aspects [unclear]?

  Davis:  We started out with a conceptual model that said, here are the pieces.  Temperature, climatic or weather conditions, meteorological measurements in the ocean, sea temperature, dissolved oxygen, nutrient levels, those are the kinds of things we think are important.  Which ones can we measure?  It turns out that in this part of the world, temperature and nutrient levels are very tightly linked, so that if you just measure temperature, you have a very good idea that there’s certain amount of nitrogen if temperatures fall.  If temperatures rise above 14 degrees Centigrade, there’s no nitrogen in the system, and the kelp won’t grow.  So just by monitoring temperature, you get a lot of other information, not for certain, because things can change, but over the last hundred years, it’s always been that way, and there are some physical reasons for that.

              So, yes, we started with a conceptual model and goals.  What do you want the monitoring program to do?  The next step was a conceptual model.  What I described to you very briefly was, well, we put it into these twelve big boxes, and within each of those boxes, we went to the experts and said, “So how do we pick things in this box that we could measure?”  And that’s what we termed “Vital Signs.”  I tried to explain to them, yes, there are all these things that we could do.  We could do blood chemistries, and we could do really exotic heavy-metal analysis of people’s bones, if you were in the health world.  We can’t do that.  We’re talking about vital signs: respiration, pulse, blood pressure.  What are those kinds of things for the elements within each of the twelve boxes?

  Louter:  Did “Vital Signs” come from your own imagination, or was Vital Signs a common ecological—

  Davis:  No, I made it up.  I made it up to market the concept and to explain to the scientists what we were trying to do, what I wanted them to explore as they gave me advice about what they thought was important, and I used it in marketing to superintendents and to the administrators of the national park system about what we were trying to do to differentiate it from an all-taxa inventory, for example.  I said, “We’re focusing on what we think are a few of the most critical things that need to be measured in the park.”

  Louter:  How did the scientific community react to that?

  Davis:  They said, “Health doesn’t apply to ecosystems.  The concept of health doesn’t work.”  We’re still having that discussion.  Most of them have been won over, but that was the first response, was, “Well, we don’t like that metaphor.  It has all these weaknesses.”

              And I said, “Yeah, but it’s really useful for getting money and for doing the long-term studies that you’ve always wanted to do but could never get funding out of NSF to do.”  You couldn’t get a university.  You couldn’t get an agency to invest in this.  I said, “By marketing this appropriately, by giving them some of the things that we think are most important right now, we can test that hypothesis.  Are these things really connected to the large trends in the system, to the integrity, the stability, the beauty, the capacity for renewal, those things we might define as health of the system?”

  Louter:  So they were willing to help you anyway?

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  Even though they didn’t like the medical—

  Davis:  Yes.  That’s right.  They inherently knew there was something important that needed to be done in the landscape scale over long periods of time.  They didn’t like the way that I was trying to market it with this medical metaphor and health.  That was really an uphill battle, and I had it again just last week over some people I’d been working with for twenty years, and we agree on most of what we’re doing.  But what I’m doing, it’s turned now to the point I’m asking them to define what do you mean by the health of an ecosystem.  So I’ve got enough people out there working on this to try and figure that out, and other people are going, “Oh, it just doesn’t apply.”

              So we had the discussion again, and then they agreed at the end.  It only took fifteen minutes this time, instead of fifteen years.  But, yes, that’s useful.  You craft something, try it and it’ll give you confidence in it.  So that’s where we are with it, and I’m back to Aldo Leopold for the definition of health.  So it’s the integrity of the community: integrity, stability, beauty (which always gets my friends in science exercised) and the capacity for self-renewal.  So stability meaning resilience, if the system is poked, if there’s an extreme event, it responds but it returns back into some normal cycle or trend of variation.  It’s like your body temperature when you’re healthy and you go running, it’s elevated, but then it comes back into a normal range.  In fact, you might define that elevated temperature when you’re exercising as part of the normal range, but it’s not useful, because if you want to differentiate the infection, then you need it at a resting state or rate.

              So it’s those kinds of real subtle things that the ecologists are having trouble with.  They can’t separate that out.  But if you tell them about temperature, then they, “Oh, yeah, okay, I understand that now.”  So the response after an El Niño year is like the elevated temperature after exercising.  It’s not like a bacterial infection that is chronic.  So we talk about chronic and acute condition.

              So it’s been a marketing effort, I would say, for twenty-five years to get the scientific community on board with some of the concepts and, on the other side, to get people to accept that there are a few things that we can measure about systems that will be useful and cost-effective.  So our stewardship is better, faster, and cheaper if we have the information than if we just guess or use just our conceptual models.  Because we all have a conceptual model of the systems we care about, like parks.  Each of these systems that we work in, we have an idea of what the boundaries are and what’s contained in that.  Some of us are a little better at knowing the details than others and knowing some of the interactions, but part of the monitoring program design is to share your conceptual model with me, and I’ll share mine with you, and through discussion, we will come up with a common conceptual model of the park that we can all then use to share information with each other about and we can modify as we learn more about how the system works.

  Louter:  In that early design phase when you’re doing the workshopping and marketing and all those other activities, did it involve bringing the experts from the scientific community out to the islands, or was it all onshore?

  Davis:  No, we did all of it.  Some of it I did with people who had been working at the islands for years.  Some of it was people who there just a couple of years. We started with people who worked at the islands, but we needed broader input.  The seabird community was a good example.  We had two or three people that had been working for quite a few years on pelicans, and another group down in Irvine that had been working on gulls, and then people up and down the coast doing their own thing in other places with the same species but in different places.

              So we convened everybody together.  The people who had been working on the islands were unwilling to commit to saying, “This is what we should measure and how we should do it,” until they had consensus from the community.  So I brought them all together.  They were a pretty contentious group and they couldn’t seem to work together well, so I had to reconvene them and bring an expert from the East Coast who knew seabirds and had a feel for monitoring.  So the wildlife guy that I worked with at Everglades, I brought him out to moderate the session, because he was an expert on their topics.  So we had another session and we were able to resolve it.  Everybody went away a lot happier and more comfortable with each other.

  Louter:  Who was that?

  Davis:  Jim Kushlan.

  Louter:  This is interesting, because in addition to getting scientists to try to get along, and that’s fairly common in a lot of academic circles, it sounds like there was in some areas a fairly strong tradition of research going on in the Channel Islands already.

  Davis:  Oh, yes, there was.

  Louter:  Which, if there hadn’t been monitoring, would have been “Let’s go back to doing research first and then we can do some monitoring,” or it would have been a different type of program.  Interesting.

  Davis:  Yes.  And even drawing the line between what is research and what is monitoring, because really what we were proposing and really what Vital Signs is today is a long-term research project.  But if we call it that, we have to re-justify it and write proposals and get funded every three to five years.  Nobody will give you research funds for more than five years.  That’s very unusual, even today, to get long-term funding.  Funding agencies rarely make those kinds of commitments.  So if we called it research, it wasn’t going to work.  So I came up with this rubric of saying, well, the first three to five years is the design, research and design, deciding how much sampling you needed, how you’re going to analyze it, how you’re going to report the information, how you think it’s linked to the other elements in the system.  That’s a research function.  Then we’ll turn it into routine monitoring that parks can conduct, and at ten-year intervals or thereabouts, we’ll synthesize that information, we’ll look at it, we’ll revise the monitoring as necessary to adapt and adopt new technologies and new sampling things that we’ve learned and evaluate where we’re going with it.  So we’ll try and keep it alive.

              That review function, that analytical function, is research again, so this thing kind of cycles in an adaptive management sort of mode of “This is the hypothesis, we’ll try this, we’ll develop something, we’ll go out and do it for a while, we’ll evaluate it, make adjustments, come back around, adjust the design and go do it for a while longer.”  So we set up this evaluation scheme, tied to park stewardship.

  Louter:  I interrupted you.

  Davis:  That’s okay.

  Louter:  But you had it all laid out and then worked with the scientists to market the Vital Signs idea, and then what is it that should be monitoring for.

  Davis:  Yes.  So in each of the twelve major components of the system, we went to the experts.  So it’s a modified Delphi approach where we said, “You’re the expert.  Nobody knows any more about this than you.”  It’s usually a group of three to five people, sometimes as many as a dozen, but usually just a few people.  And say, “What do you think we ought to do?”

              With the kelp forest, I had forty-five people.  Everybody had been doing something somewhere, different aspects of kelp forests in California.  There’s a fisheries side with state agencies.  The university people had been doing a lot of stuff in different places, not very much at the islands, and so I convened all of them, and we talked about it for quite a while, took almost a year to come up with a list of species that we thought were the best ones to be measuring and things we should do.  Then we actually went out and took them out and tried out the sampling techniques.

              So, first we decided on what the species were, abalone, urchins, snails, and sea stars.  Then I turned around and said, “Okay, how do you measure those?  Yeah, here’s the list.  We’ve got sixty-five or seventy or something.  How do you measure these?”  And we’d go around the table, and there was actually consensus.  It wasn’t too hard.  We didn’t know how big the plots were going to be or how many you needed, but the basic approach to you laid out quadrants or you measure the percent cover on the bottom or those kind of—you need a big transect because these things are rare and they’re clumped and you don’t find them very often, but when you do, you find fifty of them.  So if you put out meter-square blocks, you don’t get them very often and you get a lot of zeroes, and that really screws up your statistics.  So use bigger plots, and you have to search them systematically.  That’s what transects are.  They’re just long thin plots that are easy to search so you don’t miss areas.  If you lay out an area twenty meters on a side, the searching thing becomes a major source of variation.  But if you stretch that same area out on a band, you know, from fingertip to fingertip I can search that area and swim down that transect and I’ll find most of what’s there.  So people had learned that, and so we didn’t have to invent that.  We could take that from them and then adapt it to this place.  So we took people out on a cruise.

              Then toward the end of the development phase for both the terrestrial and the marine systems, we linked with NSF’s LTER program, and they had one of their annual meetings here.  We invited them to Channel Islands.  We took them out to the park.  We talked about what we were trying to do, how it related to what they were doing.  It wasn’t exactly the same, but we had the same kinds of goals, better long-term understanding of what was going on with populations and ecosystems.

              I got intrigued with this idea that I was talking about, the indirect connections and how powerful they were.  There was a guy at the University of Georgia that was really championing that.  Bernie Patton was his name.  So I got Bernie excited about it, and he brought six or eight of his graduate students out, and we took them out for a week and showed them the islands and the kelp forest and all that kind of stuff, and began to construct his kind of matrix ecosystem model, very different than the Odum spaghetti diagram.  This was a matrix of all of the system elements, all of the species, across and down on a spreadsheet, and you say, “Okay, go to the intersection, say what’s the interaction of these two?  Does this one eat that one?  Do they compete for space?  Is it a positive or a negative interaction?”

              So then we held a couple of workshops and got all the experts together again on the different parts of the system and constructed those matrices, and Bernie’s crew was supposed to analyze that and tell us something about it, and he lost his funding and it all fell apart.  We had a great time filling out the matrices, but we never got the analysis done.  But the idea was to test our modified Delphi monitoring design.  We’d made selections in the system, what we think are these seventy key elements.  We don’t know if they’re the right ones.  What we wanted to do with Bernie’s system was to test that to see if the ones we’d selected were actually at the nodes of all these connections in the system that would tell us something about system structure and functioning .  Or were the ones we selected the ones at the margins of the system that might tell us about shifts in the system?  We wanted a little of both of those things.  We wanted short-lived things, long-lived things, primary producers, top predators.  We wanted an array that was representative of the whole system, and that was one of our ways of checking it, one of falsifying our choices.

  Louter:  So the first couple years was about setting up the design.

  Davis:  It was designing it and getting it funded, getting it marketed, explaining to everybody why we were doing what we were doing, and so that took most of 1980.  The last half of 1980 was just a conceptualization of it.  I was just getting to learn the park and find out what’s here, what do I think is here, meeting the players, the people who’d been working in the park, and in ’81 I actually began the design and laying it all out and starting to sell it within the region, within the science program, and to the park staff, although that was simple.  There were only six people on the park staff.  I mean, it was really tiny.  It was the superintendent, administrative officer, and chief of maintenance, a new chief ranger that I’d come to work with, and a couple of island rangers.

  Louter:  Is there one area in particular that exemplifies how this all came together?  Was the kelp forest?

  Davis:  The kelp forest is the best, and it’s the one I’m the most comfortable with because I personally, actually, went out and did the research on that.  I also personally worked on the tide pools, on the sand beaches.  I didn’t do anything other than organize and drive the seabirds and the pinnipeds.  I know nothing about either of those groups and didn’t really have the time or interest in pursuing that and those experts were very well equipped and motivated to do those design studies on their own.

              I also personally directed the fisheries landings monitoring protocol.  There’s a difference between looking at fish population and looking at what people catch and take to market.  So those are the landings, what they take home and eat.  So for fishery landings, you have a whole different technique, different approach, because you’re dealing with the people, what they caught and what they threw back and what they took home.  So you’re trying to measure all those things.  So there’s a whole thing about fisheries, and that was my training and background, so, again, I was personally involved in that one.  But it turns out the state already has a monitoring system and what we were doing was just evaluating the accuracy and precision of that system to give us the data we wanted.  It turns out it’s no good, but we couldn’t afford to duplicate it.

              The problem is that the state’s fisheries landings data are geographically ambiguous.  They have reporting blocks that are ten miles on the side, and then they have big blocks that are countywide, and then they have kind of miscellaneous blocks.  So the fishermen can report where they caught things in any of these different categories, so the smallest area that was certain to have included the park was from Point Conception to Orange County.  It includes a lot of other places as well as the park.  You could not get any better resolution geographically from the system than that, so we gave up and said we’ll just use what the state reports as a proxy for what comes from the park.  It’s been satisfactory.

  Louter:  How do you monitor a kelp forest?

  Davis:  How do you measure a kelp forest?  Well, part of is, where is it?  You start at the top and say, is there a canopy here?  Does the kelp grow all the way from the bottom to the surface enough to spread out so that you can actually see it at the surface?  That’s kind of the first level.  If it doesn’t do that, then it may not be a kelp forest.  There are places where some kelp plants are growing on a few rocks, so it’s like trees in a meadow.  It’s not a forest.  But we’re looking for the forest, so that’s where the kelp actually dominates the system.  So the first cut is, where is there kelp and where has there ever been kelp?

              It is a dynamic feature.  It does grow fast.  Kelp plants can last for thirty-five, forty years, maybe as long as fifty, and it puts up new stipes every year, so sort of like rings on a tree, but not as precise.  You can count the number of stipes about a meter or so off the bottom and get a pretty good idea of the age of the plant.  It’s not a one for one, but two or three stipes per year, and some break off and go away.  But the size of the plant and the number of stipes that are going up are an indication, so you can get a rough idea of the age structure of the place just by counting stipes on a bunch of plants.  Start on the bottom and work your way through.  But that’s where you start, is with that structural element; this is where it is.

  Louter:  Were the forests mapped out there before you got here?  Were there known [unclear]?

  Davis:  Yes.  The State of California had been mapping kelp canopies since 1916, sporadically.

  Louter:  Wow.  That’s pretty impressive data.

  Davis:  Yes.  Well, it’s a really important resource to be harvested, and so it had monetary value.  They divided the kelp forest into segments that they called beds, and they leased the various beds to companies for harvest.  So they were numbered, and we had a pretty fair idea of where a kelp forest used to be a long time ago.  So part of where’s the kelp forest is where did it used to be.  Is it still there?

  Louter:  Then these 1960 [unclear]?

  Davis:  Yes, they monitored it annually up into the 1960s before it started to fall apart in 1972, ’73, it just collapsed.  Then sometimes the company would do it, but it was proprietary information.  But we managed to work with the company and get them to come help us design the monitoring, so it worked reasonably well, and they gave us access to those data.

              So the first cut was, yes, it’s an inventory.  Where is the kelp forest?  That’s the first cut.  The next is, what’s in it?  And what’s in the kelp forest varies in a consistent pattern from warm water to cold water.  So the kinds of organisms you find in the giant kelp forest at Santa Barbara Island and Anacapa and eastern Santa Cruz are quite different than the assemblage of plants and animals that you find at San Miguel and Santa Rosa.  Then there’s a transition zone that sometimes is warm and sometimes is cold along Santa Cruz Island and the eastern part of Santa Rosa.  So you have three big biogeographical zones based largely on temperature, and there’s some fluctuation.  Of course, in El Niño years, it shifts with the warm water going all the way to San Miguel, and in La Niña years it goes cold all the way down to Santa Barbara Island.

              So there’s annual and decadal variations in temperature, but that’s the basic pattern.  You’re on the border of two biogeographical regions.  The cold water is an Oregonian province that extends up into southeastern Alaska, and this is the southern end of it.  The southern one extends down through Baja California.  The kelp crops out just below the big bump in Baja California.  So before you get to the end, you’ve run out of kelp.  The water’s too warm.  The whole system changes.  There aren’t enough nutrients to support macro plants that use that much.  So we’re right on that border.

              So that’s the next thing.  Okay.  There’s kelp forest in all these places.  What drives the system and the water temperature and the nutrients that are associated with it?  Remember I talked about nitrogen.  So we’re going to zone it.  So we have three biogeographic zones.  So if you want to sample kelp forests in the park, you have to have samples or sites in at least those three zones, and you need to have replicate samples so you can look at variation, and you know they aren’t just a one-off anomoly.

              Then, if you look carefully, you find out that there’s also a big difference between kelp forests on the south sides of the islands and on the north sides of the islands, not necessarily surprising.  In the wintertime, storms come down from the north, out of the Gulf of Alaska, and they pound on the north sides of the islands.  So waves and wind, circulation changes, you get up-welling in the wintertime.  On the south side the islands in the wintertime are in the lee.  Wind blows but the waters are sheltered by the islands so it’s much calmer, you don’t get the big surge.  But that all reverses in the summertime.  In the summertime we get waves from New Zealand from the southern hemisphere that come all the way up here from the big winter storms down there that come in here, these long-period, very high waves.  It’s not like real short crashing stuff, but it’s these big swells that come in.  But when they hit the south side of the islands, they well up and they move everything around, and there are days when you can’t even dive in the summertime on the south sides a month after a big storm in New Zealand, because you’ve got these big waves.

  Louter:  These are the ones they’re surfing at Half Moon Bay?

  Davis:  Yes.  Well, those are the winter storms that come from the north, but, yes, Mavericks.  That’s right.  But those are the kinds of forces.  On the south sides of the islands, there are these very deep oceanic basins within a mile of the islands, could be a mile deep.  It has the same relief as the south rim of the Grand Canyon.  You stand up on Santa Cruz Island, look down on the canyon, and it goes down to the river at the bottom.  That’s a mile below you.  Whereas on the north sides of the islands, the Santa Barbara Channel is shallow, maybe 600 feet deep instead of 8,000 feet.  Right?  So 600 feet shallow.

              So the effects of those winds, the currents, and the waves are different on the north sides of the islands than they are on the south side, and the seasonality of when you have waves and when you don’t is different.  So that affects the biology, the reproductive biology, feeding strategies, all kinds of things of the organisms that live in the kelp forest.  So now we’ve got three biogeographical regions divided in half by north and south of the islands, so now we’ve got six zones.  So we have six different kinds of kelp forests in the park.

  Louter:  Three zones.

  Davis:  Three zones, warm, cold, and a transition, north and south of the islands, in each of those three zones.  So we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty now in the details of the design.  If you want to monitor kelp forest, you have to recognize you have six different kinds: north cold, south cold, north transition, south transition, north warm water, south warm water.  Okay.  Now I need replicate samples in each one of those.  So I’ve got to have at least twelve sites if I’m going to have two in each of those zones.

              We have one particular thing.  Remember one of the questions that the superintendent wanted answered was, how do I better protect the resources here?  I think that protecting them in a marine reserve is a really good idea.  I had a marine reserve.  I had two of them, one at Anacapa, one at Santa Barbara Island, and we lost those in the Supreme Court case.  The state did return and say, well, it’s ours, but we will keep a reserve.  We will not fish in the landing cove at East Anacapa Island and in the very narrow band of water out to a depth of sixty feet, which is like fifty yards offshore.  It’s a very narrow band along the north side of East Anacapa Island, was established as a marine reserve in 1978.  So it was fished for a few months after the court case was handed down, the decision was handed down, and took six months or a year.  So there’s a little bit of fishing, but essentially this place on the north side of East Anacapa Island has been protected sometime in the late sixties, a little blip, and then from ’78 on.  So we have a protected area where fishing doesn’t occur.

              We fish everywhere else.  So if you want to examine the effects of fishing on kelp forest systems, do a comparison of inside the reserve with outside the reserve in the same biogeographical exposure zone.  So we put two sites inside the reserve and we put a couple more sites outside the reserve in the same zone, so we have more sample sites so we can do a more powerful comparison of inside and outside the reserve, because we were looking for differences between fished kelp forests and protected kelp forests, and it’s a monitoring program, but it’s long-term research.  In this case, we wanted to test the hypothesis that fishing was altering the integrity, stability, beauty, and capacity for renewal of the kelp forest.  So we have two sites inside and four sites outside that allow us to look at that.

              So that’s how we first began to focus down from kelp forest, one of the twelve big boxes, into, all right, what do we go out on the ground and measure?  Then we have a very fundamental decision in monitoring in this kind of sampling for ecosystems of landscape scales, is do you take randomly selected sites every time so that you could expand your samples to make population estimates of the whole?  If you do that, you introduce a source of variation by going to slightly different places every time.  There are microclimates.  There are little places where things hang out and where they don’t, where animals congregate to spawn and where they don’t.  So there’s little site variations.  If you go back to exactly the same places every time, you eliminate that because you’re going back to exactly the same spot, but you no longer have the power to extrapolate to the whole zone and say, well, what’s going on here represents the whole zone, because now you’ve just picked one place.  It’s an index of what’s going on in the zone, but you no longer have the same power to infer that what you see is what’s going on in a broader area.  So it’s quite a conundrum.

              The modern way of doing that with technology and with our analytical power is to do a little of both, have some fixed sites, and then you do some randomly selected sites each time.  In 1980 I wasn’t that sophisticated, nor was anybody else that was helping us, and we didn’t have the tools to do it.  We had quite a discussion about that, and we settled on doing fixed sites.  We randomly selected the fixed sites.  We went out and looked at all of the possible sites within each of those six zones and said, “Well, we could put a site here, a site here, a site here.  They have similar exposures.”  So we made them as similar as possible, and then we randomly selected among them and established a hundred-meter-long line that was fixed to the bottom.  We actually drilled holes every ten meters in the bottom and put in stainless steel eye-bolts and connected them with lead line, a half-inch nylon woven line with a lead core in it that they used to hold down the bottom of gill nets.

              So it’s physically marked.  So you know, one, when you go back to the place, I found it.  I didn’t just get close with the compass and the fathometer to know I’m in the right depth and pretty close, but I’m actually on the same place.  I stretch a hundred-meter tape out on the bottom, and then I can randomly select where I put the quadrants to count urchins or where I put the band transects to count abalone or to swim up and down and count all the fish that are within two meters of that line on each side.  So I can swim down, count an area a hundred meters long and two meters wide, and then turn around and swim back the other direction two meters wide and a hundred meters long.  I can do that eight times, and I have a good sample.  I’ve eliminated the variation that I’ll get from counting fish at that place on that day.

              So that was the next step of, okay, I’ve got my list of species now that I want to count, and they represent the cold water/warm water transition species, and I’m going to measure them all the same way, and I’ll be able to see that transition zone move back and forth, because I’ve selected both warm water and cold water species so I can see in their distributional changes from year to year how that’s going to work out.

  Louter:  It requires diving?

  Davis:  It requires being there, yes, and seeing things, and that’s something previous generations of scientists didn’t have available to them.  It’s only after 1957 that we really had free access to the bottom, because we had repetitive dive tables and we have neoprene.  Without the neoprene for thermal protection and without the repetitive dive tables that allowed you to go back several times each day, you were limited to either doing decompression dives, which is dangerous, or you could only make one dive each day.

  Louter:  How far down do you have to go?

  Davis:  Well, we limited how far we would go by what was practical, and that’s sixty feet, eighteen meters.  It’s not very far.  We’re just scratching the surface, but that tells us a lot about our system.

  Louter:  Is that on the bottom?

  Davis:  Oh, yes.  Yes, we’re working on the bottom.  So we work in kelp forests that are less than sixty feet deep, because if you’re very careful about planning your day and you start early, in each day at sixty feet you can get about two hours of observation time out of each diver.  So you get two half-hour dives in the morning and two half-hour dives in the afternoon.  You can spend as much as sixty minutes at sixty feet without having to decompress.  And when you’re on the surface, you’re off-gassing.  What you’re doing is absorbing nitrogen into your tissues, and you have to be able to surface long enough for the nitrogen you’ve accumulated during the dive to get out of your tissues.  Blood and lung tissue absorb it and give it up very quickly, but fat and bone take it up very slowly and give it up very slowly.  So once you get it saturated in those slower tissues, it takes a long time to get rid of it.  The whole physiology and our knowledge of how that works is relatively primitive.

              The U.S. Navy, the British Navy developed these repetitive dive tables, the ability to go back and make several dives in a day, based on trial and error.  They got a bunch of eighteen- to twenty-one-year-old males that were in excellent physical condition and put them in decompression chambers or recompression chambers, and they’d take them down to depths and leave them there for a little while, and then they’d bring them up and see what happened.  When 12 percent of them got bent, they said, “Okay, that’s safe,” and they would go back and they would take them deeper and longer, and they’d work out in stages how long you could stay at these different things, based on the physiology of this one little segment of our population.  As you get older or if you’re female and you have more fat and less muscle, you have different exchange rates going on.  They did the engineering thing of building them in so that they were twice as safe as they thought they needed to be just in case they didn’t know what they were doing.  Turned out to be pretty good, pretty reliable.  But that’s what we were working with.

              Now we have dive computers that everybody carries with them that have twelve tissues or twelve or more tissues, fast tissues, slow tissues, so these different blocks, that are integrated through various electronic and ceramic membranes and all kinds of stuff that you actually carry around.  It’s not much bigger than my watch, that tell you how long you can stay at this depth, and then you need to go up to that one.  How you manage your dive has changed completely because of the technology.

              But in the 1980s, we were still working with paper tables and working out how many minutes and keeping track of everything.  It was a major effort for a dive master on the boat to keep track of all the divers, and you’re pairing people up.  Well, you have to pair them usually for the day because it makes it much easier.  If you try mixing people, well, he’s been at sixty feet for twenty-five minutes and he’s been at fifty feet for forty minutes, you know, trying to match up all those different things gets to be a challenge.  Anyway, that’s part of why it’s harder to work under water than it is to go walk up on a hillside and start measuring trees.

              The other thing is that the nitrogen in the air that you breathe when you’re diving is narcotic, like nitrous oxide when you go to the dentist, happy gas.  The effect of the nitrogen under pressure at a depth of sixty feet is about like having two martinis on an empty stomach.  When you get to a hundred feet, it’s like four martinis on an empty stomach.  So you are slightly intoxicated when you are at depth, and that means you have to be really clear about the data sheets, what they look like, and how easy they are to read.  Now, the good news is that there’s no hangover from the nitrogen.  As soon as you come back to the surface, the effect goes away.  But when you’re at depth, that’s the rapture of the deep that [Jacques] Cousteau used to talk about.  When you get down in warm clear water and you’re at 150 feet, 200 feet, you’re just so happy.  It’s like alcohol without the hangover, without the physiological stress of having to process that.

              But when you’re designing a sampling scheme, you want to take it and say, “Okay, we’re going to make everything work here in half-hour, thirty-minute blocks of time so that people are not stressed.”  Some people use up their air very fast.  Some do it very slow.  You need to work this out for the average person who is a trained scientific diver, not really average, but everybody will be able to do this, and they have to do it in pairs.  Nobody can go alone.

              Most of the techniques are pretty straightforward.  You can take a clipboard, you can put data sheets on it with underwater paper, and you can write on it with a pencil.  Not too bad.  Wasn’t that long ago, people were writing on slates, and then you had to transcribe the information, which is another source of error, as you know.

  Louter:  You had slates?

  Davis:  Yes, took plastic slates, and you can rough them up with sandpaper and then you can write on them, but then you have to transcribe it.

              But we used drafting vellum that’s frosted on one side, so you could write on that.  Take those sheets off.  They last a long time.  They’re really good.  If you’re really broke, you can transcribe off of those, but you can take five or six sheets down with you.  That becomes important.  If you’re just counting urchins in quadrants or abalones on transects, one sheet of paper will do each diver just fine for thirty minutes.  But if you’re doing percent cover, if you’re looking at the bottom and you want to randomly select points, you want to check to see what grows there, so it’s easy to count discrete things like abalones or lobsters, but things that are like the lawn at your house, you don’t want to count the grass blades.  You want to look at how much area is covered with lawn.  So let me select some random points and I’ll look to see what’s sidewalk, what’s lawn, and that’s what you do on the bottom.  What’s sand, what’s rock, what’s gravel, what’s algae, what’s bryozoans?  We have colonial anemones that cover the bottom.  So we’ve got some colonial animals that do that as well.  So sampling them is not a matter of counting the individuals; it’s a matter of looking at the area that they occupy, and the easiest, fastest, cheapest way is to look at the area covered.

              So after randomly selecting a bunch of points, well, that’s a challenge.  Some guys who are really clever worked out a method of selecting random points that works well.  You tie two strings--a short string and a long string that you attach to a rod that’s about a meter long, like slack bowstrings.  We tied five knots in each string and then you can pull them out taut to each knot to define 10 points on each side of the rod.  If you randomly select where you put the rod on the bottom, then when you pull the knot out, that’s another randomly selected point, and you can go to the next point and the next point.  Soon you have ten points on this side of the rod.  Put the strings on the other side, you can do ten points on the other side of the rod.  Put the rod on the other side of the transect line and you could do ten more points, ten more points, so you get twenty points on each side of the transect, and forty points in a plot, roughly two meters by 0.5 m

  Louter:  Did they develop this on their own?

  Davis:  A number of people worked on it for quite a while, and we adapted it a little bit to use here, and we started out saying, well, what we want to do then is look at how many points within each plot, and how many plots do you need to resolve the variation that you got.  And it’s different for some things.  Little cup corals are relatively rare compared to grasses and algae that grow all over the bottom.  But cup corals are really hard.  They’re very small and there are a lot of them.  So percent coverage is actually a good way to measure them, but there’s more variation in their abundance, so you need more plots for them.  So the technique has to adjust.  We may use that technique to measure thirteen or fourteen different taxa.  So we’ve worked all that out.

              But what you ended up with was to do one sample, you needed to look at something like a thousand points, and at each point you could have up to twelve possible species.  Well, most of the time you could have two or three species for each point (knot), because they’re layered.  You know, the algae grows over something.  So you’re looking at this point and you say, well, on the bottom there’s crustose coraline algae, and then there’s another brown alga that’s waving over the top of that, and then there’s this tunicate that’s waving in there, too.  So I may have three things at that point, and I want to record the substrate.  I want to know how storms affect how much bare rock there is or how much hard bedrock there is versus how much cobble, how much sand.  So I’m measuring three kinds of substrate.

  Louter:  All in one spot.

  Davis:  All in one spot, right.  So a thousand points, and I could have three or four observations for each one.  That’s a lot of bookkeeping for somebody on two martinis.

  Louter:  Yes.  [laughs]

  Davis:  And it would take us seven hours of bottom time to gather that sample at each site, and that’s a lot of time.  You’ve only got eight divers.  They only get two hours each all day.

  Louter:  Is that at one point?

  Davis:  No, no, at one site where we have a hundred-meter-long transect.  So we’d have, I think it was twenty or twenty-five of these plots and forty points in each one.  It was twenty-five of them, I think, with forty points in each one.  So we’re working our way down.  Just the recordkeeping was driving me nuts.

              So part of the design study was to find a better, faster, cheaper way of doing that work, and we discovered that there was not SCUBA, but surface supply diving equipment used in commercial fields where the air line comes down to you, but you just have a mask.  You don’t have to wear a big helmet.  Or they did have the helmets, but it was modified so that you could just wear the mask, and it had a microphone in it, and you had earpieces.  So you had not only air, but communications to the surface.  So now the data sheet could stay on the boat.  Somebody who was warm and dry and not affected by the narcosis of the nitrogen was actually keeping track of the data.  The observer on the bottom only had to look at the point and talk about what he saw.  He didn’t have to go to a data sheet and say, “Okay, well, this is rock and it’s got crustose algae and it has articulated algae and it’s got a sponge.”  Okay, then you have to go find on the data sheet and put Xs in all of those categories.  Now he just looks at it, calls out what he sees.  The guy on the surface records it.  It cut the sampling time down to ninety minutes from seven hours.

  Louter:  But physiologically it’s the same, right?

  Davis:  For the observer, it’s the same.  He’s only focused on “What do I see at this point?”

  Louter:  Not trying to write it down.

  Davis:  He’s not trying to write it down.  You take your eye off the point, and you go back and say, “Oh, what else was on there?”  Then you have to pull the string out, find the point, look down, and say, “Oh, yeah, that’s what it was.”  So you’re just focused on you pull it out with your finger and you get to that point, you look at it, and you just talk about what you see.  So it went so much faster.

              The person on the surface would say—you’d pull them out and you’d be going knot to knot to knot.  Then you’d pull the next string out and you’d do it.  You might skip.  Well, the guy on the surface would say, “Hey, you owe me another point for that quadrant.”  You go back and, “Oh, yeah, it’s this one,” and you could do that.  So the quality of the data got better, it got faster, it was cheaper, and it was a lot safer.

              So that was one of the things we adopted was the surface supplied air and bottom to surface communication., Similarly, we took a video camera under to do the fish sampling, because there’s a lot of variation to what people see when they’re swimming and trying to count fish.  We said, well, one thing we’d like to do is have an image of each of these sites that we could share with people, and home videos and VHS and Beta were a big deal in the early 1980s.  It was a brand-new thing to have videotape in the home in ’81, and the thought that somebody could put one of those cameras into underwater housing was a really novel idea.

              But we found a friend who was an engineer, and he was trying to play with that.  So we bought one of his first housings and took it out, started swimming it up and down the line to count the fish.  Then we found out it wasn’t so good at sampling fish, but it was great for characterizing the appearance of these places, so we could relate to people what a density of urchins of 200 looked like versus a density of 600.  It was very valuable, because people would look at the moving pictures when they wouldn’t sit still for a PowerPoint presentation of densities of urchins.  But you could show them pictures and they’d like that.

              At the same time, we said, “Oh, you know what?  If we gave the camera to one of these guys with the surface-supplied air and communications to the surface, we could show people on the boat and talk to them about what we were seeing.  We could take them on a tour of the kelp forest, and they can talk to us and ask us questions about what they see.  What a great interpretive tool.”

  Louter:  This is in 1982?

  Davis:  Well, it’s probably ’83 or ’84 by the time we got around to putting all the pieces together.  And we went out and got money from Texaco Oil and General Telephone and, I don’t know, we got some corporate donors to buy complete sets of the gear and build a little structure on the dock at Anacapa so we could share an underwater walk in the kelp forest, an underwater video program live, with the public.  So out of the monitoring program came the origin of this interpretive program that runs today that is the foundation of Channel Islands Live that we now microwave back into the Visitors Center, and people in the Visitors Center can talk to the diver on the bottom of the landing cove at Anacapa in the reserve and ask questions about marine life, and the divers can explain to them what’s really cool about this marine forest in the sea.  Yeah, that’s cool stuff.  So we introduced microcomputers to the park and the Park Service and did some technology stuff early on in the design of monitoring that’s turned out to be useful for parks.

  [Begin File 5]

  Davis:  We brought divers from lots of professional fields and oceanography and biology.  What they all have in common is the ability to actually get in the water and experience what’s there.  They can see it, touch it, measure it.  All investigations of the ocean prior to the late 1950s were dragging stuff behind boats, and that’s sampling devices and dropping stuff, grabs over the side and grabbing up chunks at the bottom and dragging it back up and sorting through it to see what was in it.  That’s still a great way of doing science, but that’s what people were doing on the Challenger expedition in the middle of the nineteenth century, and some people are still doing it today.

              But SCUBA, that became available with, like I’m saying, neoprene and repetitive dive tables in 1957, really opened the door to people being able to get in the ocean and see what was going on, at least for that surface area down to about 130 feet.  For the monitoring program, we set an artificial ceiling at sixty feet, just because of the practicality, as I was explaining.  You only get a couple hours a day out of each diver at that depth.  If you go deeper, you don’t get enough time to make it cost effective—you get sixty minutes for free at sixty feet.  You get a hundred minutes at fifty feet, two hundred minutes at forty feet, and unlimited time above thirty feet.  So down to sixty you’re okay, but when you go to seventy feet, you only get fifty minutes, eighty feet, forty minutes, well, thirty minutes, something like that.  I’ve forgotten what they are now.  That was something that you memorized when we used it all the time.  That was thirty years ago.

              But your time drops off, so by the time you get to a hundred feet, you’ve only got ten minutes on the bottom before you have to leave.  I mean, you can’t monitor things.  You can safely dive there and look around, you could take some pictures, but you can’t really go count and measure things, the hours that are required.  So sixty feet was just a practical limit.  It’s safe enough.  It’s deep enough to give you a good picture of what that coastal ocean looks like, but you just can’t afford to work much below that because of the time required, time and depth.

              So that’s why we were exploring being able to live in the ocean on the Tektite Project in the Virgin Islands, because once you’ve gone down and your body is saturated with the nitrogen, you can stay forever, and you only have to decompress one time.  Now, that decompression is twenty-one hours, but you only do it once.  So if you stay for sixty days, you can go out and work all day long at fifty feet, sixty feet, seventy feet, and come back up to the habitat that was at fifty feet.  So you can work, ten, twelve hours a day on the bottom as an observer, measuring, mapping, following animals around, putting tags on them and seeing what’s going on.  So that’s what we were exploring, was trying to push that limit.

              It turns out that the limits are not the air or the gas that you’re breathing, as much it is cold.  Cold is the major limiting factor, even in tropical waters.  If you’re not getting the radiant heat of the sun, even wearing wetsuits, you get cold, and so you’ve got to then go to either dry suits, which in the past were very difficult to maintain.  They were latex, and you get a little hole in it, and then you’re wet.  So they weren’t really all that dry.  Or you could do hot-water suits.  You could run hot water down a hose into the suit and circulate that inside the suit and vent it.  People tried all this kind of stuff to work in these habitats.  Once we solved the problem of being able to stay being saturated with the gas, then we ran into cold, and that became an even more severely limiting thing.  When you’re cold on top of the narcosis of the nitrogen and you’re shivering when you’re waiting to go in for the next dive, you’re dreading it, the quality of the information that you collect really degrades.  So you try to avoid those kinds of circumstances in designing these things.

              So all of those physical limitations of getting into this foreign environment make it very difficult, so you have to plan things very carefully and precisely and say, “This is your little piece.  I’m going to decompose this big problem of how we sample all these things in the kelp forest into this half-hour block of time for this one observer.  This is what you need to do at this site.”  Becomes very standardized, so it can be repeated, and it can be repeated by different people and you get the same result, you get the same thing.  So you can send different people down to count the same quadrant and you should get the same results.  That was part of the design work, and we would do that, or we would have two meter-square quadrants side by side, and have one diver do one and another would do the other one.  You’d work your way down the transect line doing those samples, and then you’d compare one half of the one-by-two-meter quadrant.  There shouldn’t be much of a difference, a little variation, but there shouldn’t be much of a difference.

              Again, it was a way of looking at observer variability and it’s part of the quality control, quality assurance for the long-term monitoring, that you can quickly go through and identify each crew’s sample site, each observer, to see if there are patterns emerge that are related to those people, and if you need to retrain and probably discard the data that came from that observer.

  Louter:  You mentioned using video at some point.

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  Did you have still images of the quadrants?

  Davis:  We did.  We actually set up some photo quadrants on the bottom that we put four pins in the rock at two-meter centers, so in the corners, two meters apart, and then we took a PVC frame down.  It was a big X that had cross pieces and little corners on it, and you hooked the corners over the four pins, and then you put a frame on the camera.  You mount the camera on a little tripod-like thing that is a half a meter on a side, and so you can line it up with the two corners.

              There’s a picture in the handbook.  You’d line it up on the two corners up here and take this half of it.  So if this is two meters, you put the camera here, then you move the camera to here, take the picture, move it to here, move it to here, then you can come down here and do this side, this side, this side.  You can cover this whole area and end up with twenty square meters at bottom, because within the four meters, two-by-two in the center.  But then you can hook the top legs on the bottom pins, and you can come down here and do four square meters here, and you can go off to the right and do four square meters.  You can go to the top and do four square meters and to the left and do four.  So you get those sixteen, the four in the middle, you get twenty square meters, and you’ve shot it in a mosaic of these half-meter-square plots.  So you’re very close with great detail with two strobes, so you get good definition of the bottom.  You can see, we thought, everything that was there.  So we did that at all of the sites.

              They were sampling the same things in slightly different quadrants.  The other quadrants we did linearly along a hundred-meter-long line and did more of them.  But we were checking.  Part of what I wanted were just the images, and part of it I wanted to test whether or not we could actually count the stuff that was on the bottom from the pictures, and it turns out it’s not very accurate.  It’s really hard work and it’s really expensive.  It takes a long time, and people go nuts trying to count stuff and look into crevices and see what’s in there, whereas if you’re there, it’s just that fast and you move on.

              So turns out that observers had tremendous variability in trying to record from the photographs what was there, even for the easiest things to count.  Some people could do it and some people couldn’t, and it just wasn’t reliable.  What it did allow us to do, or would have, we gave up doing it, because it took two diverse, each half an hour, took about an hour of bottom time to just take the pictures, and then you had to have them processed and then you had to record the data from them.  So it turned out to be a pretty expensive prospect.  What it would have allowed us to do, and today with digital technology, you’d be able to mosaic the twenty square meters and actually have this wonderful little like an aerial photograph of the bottom of the kelp forest.

  Louter:  Does anybody use that kind of technology today?

  Davis:  Yes, coral reefs.  There are some folks that are doing two-meter-by-two-meter plots.  They just take one picture of a big plot and go back.  What they’re doing is not identifying or counting things, but they’re measuring the limits of the coral head, so you can look at the growth and the interaction of which species are next to other species.  So there are some interesting things that can be garnered from that.  It was a technique that I had learned and used at Dry Tortugas on the coral reef down there that I imported to the kelp forest and tried it here.  It was one of things that we tried, and it provided some useful information, but it wasn’t cost-effective, was kind of the bottom line.

  Louter:  The other stuff that probably wouldn’t be that effective, but interesting to talk about the underwater—I don’t know what they call them.  Underwater robot exploration.

  Davis:  The remotely operated vehicles, ROVs.  It’s an autonomous vehicle that flies on its own.

  Louter:  That book, Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, the guys who actually were going out and using these devices to go down and find the sunken ships from the California Gold Rush.

  Davis:  Yes, that’s right.  And you can use the small submarine and go look around.  So the remotely operated vehicles are currently the way we are extending our reach into the sea and moving from the sixty-foot mark or the eighty-foot mark where divers can go routinely and to extend out to about six hundred feet.  Not quite.  Maybe four hundred feet effectively.  That’s what we’re doing now to measure fish densities in the new marine reserves, inside and outside, in deeper water beyond where divers can go.

              The ROVs can’t operate effectively in the kelp forest because they get tangled up in the kelp, but outside of that, they work fine.  The autonomous vehicles that work without an umbilical back to the mother ship are not powerful enough yet.  The battery technology, navigational capacity is not quite there.  On coral reefs, on deep coral reefs on the south side of St. John in the Virgin Islands, they’re doing some great work.  NOAA’s doing some experimental work out there on mapping using these autonomous vehicles, because there’s nothing there to tangle them up, and it’s warm, clear, batteries don’t freeze up or lose their power because they’re in really cold water.  So it works quite well there for them to be able to develop some map products for us.

              That requires R&D beyond the capacity of the Park Service right now for ocean stuff.  That’s part of our long-range strategy for the ocean programs.  The Park Service needs to have access to that kind of technology.  We don’t need to develop it.  We need to work with NOAA and use their vessels and their equipment to do those things and to use them to explore the parks and discover what’s there.  So that’s where we’re headed.

              The kelp forest monitoring is based on the technology of the late twentieth century and what we could do.  It was very practical, back to the Vital Signs concept, can we get our finger on the pulse of the ocean right near shore in these remarkable diverse kelp forests.

  Louter:  So in the kelp forest, you are going down with an idea of what you want to inventory or monitor, right?

  Davis:  Well, it’s to monitor, yes.  We skipped over the inventory piece.  We made a list.  We said we already know there’s about a thousand species.

  Louter:  [unclear]?

  Davis:  Yes, in our consensus group with the experts, we picked about sixty-three, I think is what we have settled on now, but I think we had maybe seventy-some when we started.  We had to make some choices about what things you measure.  Part of it, again, is just practical, what you can identify with certainty.  There are maybe twenty species of red sponges that grow in the kelp forest, and the only way you can tell one from another is to actually take a little of the tissue back to the boat, dissolve the soft tissue, look under a microscope and look.  They have these spicules, silicon spicules that have different shapes.  Some of them look like barbells.  Some of them are triangular.  Some of them look like the little spears that are sharp on both ends.  You have to look at the mix of those spicules to know what species it is.  Well, that’s ridiculous.  We can’t monitor something that requires that kind of identification.  But we want to know something about sponges, and if we select multiple species, we’re not going to get the same kind of precision of information.  So we want a species of sponge that we can follow, because out of the twenty, as one declines, another one takes its place, and we would never see that change in the system.

              So we picked a little round orange sponge about the size of a golf ball.  There’s nothing else like it.  It’s a sponge, grows in there.  It filters water.  It tells you kind of what the life of the sponge is going to be like in this place, and so that became our indicator, not one of the red ones that we couldn’t identify.

              So that whole selection process, it’s an art.  It’s not the science part.  It’s based on the experience of all the people around the table with us trying to make a decision about which things they think are important, which things can we measure, and going after that representative sample of big things and little things, long-lived things, things that only live for a year, things that are primary producers that are growing with photosynthesis, things that are grazing on them and things that are eating the grazers, and things that eat the things that eat the grazers.  So we’re looking all through the system, and we came up with these seventy-some, and those are the ones that we picked.

              We picked the places, as I described, the geographic zones and things, and then we actually went out there with hundred-meter-long tape and said, okay, where’s there a piece of kelp forest big enough that I can stretch this out on, that I can actually get my sampling universe that is twenty meters wide and a hundred meters long?

  Louter:  Is there a depth too?

  Davis:  And we don’t want it any deeper than sixty feet.

  Louter:  Do you go up to the surface?

  Davis:  Yes, we can.  Generally, the stuff we’re interested in sampling is on the bottom.  The kelp goes all the way to the surface, and there are things that live in the canopy, but those are not things that we could readily sample.  They’re very cryptic.  They’re hard to see.  The uncertainty of being able to count them is quite high.  Most of the action, most of the diversity and the production is going on on the bottom.  So we focus on that benthic community.

              The fishes get up off the bottom a little bit, but most of them are associated with the bottom as well.  So the ones that we chose to sample are related to the bottom community, the benthic community.

              So we then established these hundred-meter-long lines and physically identified them on the bottom with these stainless-steel stakes and eye-bolts and then ran the rope through in ten-meter segments, and then we’d tie the rope off so if somebody drug an anchor across this thing, it would just pull out that one section of ten meters.  The rest of it would still be there.  This was before we had LORAN, before we had any kind of navigational system or GPS, to be able to relocate things.  It also gave us a target that was a hundred meters long, and we had recorded very carefully where we thought it was and what direction it was running in so that as you begin to search for it, you put people in the water.  The first thing you do when you arrive at a site to sample is to put two divers where you think the middle of the line is and let them swim back and forth perpendicular to the line and find it, swim down to one end of it, put a buoy up to the surface, swim down to the other end, put a buoy up to the surface, and then anchor the boat in the middle on the line.  Then the divers are all about fifty meters from where they have to work for the day.

              So practical things like that of just working out the routines, how you’re going to do that, and sometimes in deep water, where there weren’t very many landmarks and the bottom was pretty flat so there weren’t big changes in depth to give you a clue, we could spend four hours looking for a site.

  Louter:  But you can’t leave them permanently marked?

  Davis:  Well, they were permanently marked, but not on the surface.  Virtually impossible because of storms and boat traffic and malicious people.  It’s pretty hard to do that.  There are such things as pop-up buoys that are radio-controlled, so they sit on the bottom, and you come by and push a button and, supposedly, it releases the buoy and it pops up to the surface.  People tried those, but they’re not very reliable.  Turned out they really weren’t worth the money and wouldn’t last for a year.  This is kind of an annual checkup.  We visit each site during the summer two or three times.  One of the things we discovered about fish is that they change from day to day quite a bit, and then you have to visit the site on two different days to get a reliable sample of abundance and diversity.

  Louter:  The sections or the areas you were sampling, were they far from shore, far from the islands?

  Davis:  None more than a mile, because that was the park boundary, so we stayed in the park.  Some of them are as close as maybe fifty meters.  Most of them are several hundred meters offshore.  A few are around a thousand.  There’s some small offshore islands and rocks off of Santa Cruz, and one of our sites is there, and it’s probably close to fifteen hundred meters from Santa Cruz Island, but it’s only a hundred meters from the little offshore rock, and that’s where the boundary of the park is calculated from that offshore rock.  So it’s well within the park, but it’s a ways out.

  Louter:  What’s the water clarity like?  I’ve obviously never been down there.

  Davis:  The average clarity here at the islands is the same as it is in the Florida Keys, about thirty to thirty-five feet, so it’s quite good.  It can be as much as seventy-five meters, I think, was the most that we’ve measured here, and I’ve measured a little over a hundred meters in the Dry Tortugas.  So on the clearest of clear days, it’s a little clearer in the tropics, but it gets pretty clear here.  It’s mostly rock.  There’s not much sediment.  Whereas here on the mainland of California, you look along the shoreline, it’s mostly beach and soft sediments, and the rivers are dumping fine sediments in.  That’s a lot of what clouds the water, and also there a lot of nutrients that run from the watersheds out, and so the plankton blooms here along the shoreline and that reduces the visibility.  But the island visibility is usually pretty good.  But you can’t see from one of the transect line to the other, the hundred meters.  You cannot see from one end to the other.

              On good days, on the best of days, you can see from one side to the other.  It’s twenty meters.  We ran ten-meter transects out from the main transect line perpendicular to it, and so you’d hook a tape onto the main line and run it out ten meters, and then you would swing back with a stick a meter and a half long and you would count all the abalones back to the main line and then go to the other side of your tape, swim back out the ten meters, counting abalone, and then you’d wind the tape up and move to the next randomly selected number down the main transect line, do that again while your partner’s doing the same thing on the opposite side of the main transect line.  So you could almost see each other when you were twenty meters apart.  Divers should be able to see each other all the time.  The safety thing is that you dive in pairs for that reason.  So we stretched that a little bit on those samples, on the band transects.  You’re always connected to each other on these tape measures and you’ve got all these points of reference if you have problems, and we have never had any problems.

  Louter:  No sharks?

  Davis:  Yes, we do have pretty white sharks up here, and they eat seals all the time, but we’ve never had any encounters while we had divers in the water.  We see them sometimes when we’re on the boats, but, yes, we’ve never had an encounter.

  Louter:  They don’t go down to the kelp forest?

  Davis:  They don’t come into the kelp forest very often.  They patrol the areas off the islands off the sand beaches where the seals are hauled out and where the pups are playing when the surf’s up, seems to be the areas they are most interested in patrolling.

  Louter:  [unclear] all the islands?

  Davis:  Mostly San Miguel and Santa Rosa, where it’s cold and there’s fog.  The pinniped pups are not able to regulate their thermal tolerances very well, and if they’re sitting out in the hot sun of southern California, as a northern fur seal, not so good, or even sea lions or elephant seals.  They have troubles with that.  So there’s a lot more fog and overcast and cool winds blowing at San Miguel and the western part of Santa Rosa.  That’s where they hang out.  The elephant seal population has grown so much that they’re now moving eastward on the south side of Santa Rosa along those beaches in little pockets, and there are some elephant seals down at Santa Barbara Island.  I’m not sure exactly what’s going to happen when they run out of those spaces.  That will be interesting to see how that goes.

              The northern elephant seal population was down to about twenty-five individuals on the islands off Mexico because of hunting pressure.  When that stopped, they recovered dramatically they’re now well over 100,000.  The population has rebounded.  Most of them are breeding at San Miguel.  They feed off the Aleutians and then they come down here to molt and to pup.  So they come twice a year.  They come to San Miguel Island and Santa Rosa to breed and pup in the fall and winter and come back again in spring to molt.  It’s one of the longest mammal migrations known, because they do it twice a year.

  Louter:  Similar populations up at Point Reyes?

  Davis:  Año Nuevo and Point Reyes, yes, same critters.  Same critters, but theyare very small populations there.  You can go to San Miguel and see thirty or forty thousand of those elephant seals at one time.  You just look out and on the beach there are thirty thousand of them, wall to wall seals.  It’s an amazing wildlife display.  It’s like the Serengeti Plain in Africa if you want to look at big animals, only instead of being wildebeest and antelope, these are lions and tigers and bears and big carnivores, 3500-pound carnivores.

  Louter:  You’re not monitoring the great whites?

  Davis:  Well, we would, but it’s just not practical.  That’s one of the things.  One of the criteria for the long-term monitoring for fisheries, you can’t use the standard fishery sampling techniques, because those standard techniques and fishing either kill the animals or significantly stress them.  So if you use nets and traps or hook and line, all of the techniques that people have developed for catching fish, all harm them.  We’re talking some of the fish here live seventy-five, eighty years, a hundred years, a hundred and fifty years, some of the rockfish, and they get to be this big and sit on one section of reef.  They may not move a hundred meters from where they settled as juveniles for a hundred years.  If you move into that population and you begin sampling by taking those big individuals out occasionally, you become the biggest impact on the population.  If that were the only way we could do it, then the fixed-site strategy is out the door.  You have to then randomly sample all over.  But if you’re sampling with replacements, so you’re not taking them out, then you can go back and sample those same individuals over and over and over again without damaging, without changing their behaviors.

              So we had to come up with visual techniques we developed.  We had a lot of trouble with fish, because they really are variable, and the standard techniques altered the populations by killing them or removing them or damaging them.  So what people traditionally had done is swim down the line and counted all the fish that they saw.  Nobody knew what that meant relative to the actual population, so one of the things we did in the design study for kelp was to build an electro-shocking device that works in the ocean, which we were told by the people who do electro-shocking in fresh water that it was impossible.  But I had a colleague who worked on lobsters in Western Australia, who had an engineer as a neighbor, and they built one of these things.  He said, “Oh, yeah, we can do that.  We use it to capture lobsters and tag them and turn them loose.”  So he sent me the plans, and I sent them to the guy who builds electro-shockers in Colorado, and he said, “Yeah, I can build one of these.”  So he did.

  Louter:  [unclear].

  Davis:  Yes.  So we built this electro-shocker and we brought it out.  We set it up on the bottom.  It has a negative and a positive electrode, and we had two configurations of electrodes, one, was grids about that square (< 1 m) of stainless steel, and the other was  a welding cable about 20 m long with rods about 30 cm long  attached along it every meter or so it so it could be deployed on the bottom in a circle with the other electrode configured as a small ring, like a crown, in the center. You put them down on the bottom, and anything between the grids is going to get zapped.  It’s going to get stunned.  The idea was, you stun the fish, you could then collect them on the bottom without having to take them to the surface, and you could measure them, put a tag in them, and turn them loose, and they’d swim off.  Then you can just swim through the population and estimate the whole population by looking at the proportion of tagged ones to untagged ones and see how that changes every time you add another hundred tags to the population.  You can work out those ratios and make good population estimates.  So then we could look at, well, the population hasn’t changed.  We can demonstrate that by looking at our tag returns, and we can look at the index we get by swimming down the line and counting fish. Comparing the two population estimates we could calibrate our transect counts to actual population estimates.

              Now, that was the purpose of that whole thing, but nobody had ever done this before, and I’m just terrified of electricity.  The first time we did it, the divers took everything down.  We took it on the bottom.  We set it all up.  We put some bait in cups that fish couldn’t get to, but they could smell it, so they were attracted in between the electrodes.  We went back up on the boat.  We’re in a steel-hulled boat, sitting in saltwater, and we’re about to turn on this electrical device that’s going to stun things.  I had no idea how it was going to work.  Everybody in the boat got up on dry blocks of wood, stood there, reached over, turned it on, and we turned it off.  I got in the water and went down and looked and, sure, enough, we’d stunned some fish.  I said, “Well, that’s cool.”

              Well, we worked our way into—I snorkeled over the site and watched it while it worked.  We turned it on, turned it off, and we finally figured out that, just like my friend in Australia had told me, you can get in the water with the thing, just don’t get between the electrodes.  In fact, when we got schooling fish that came around and eventually we could see that it’s a classic electrical field arcing between the eletrodes, right out of your physics textbook, it looks like a football, it arcs above and below and around to the sides, between the electrodes that are about two or three meters apart, and it’s in that field you can stun fish.  So you get a school of fish that would approach this thing, and you’d see they would avoid the electrical field.  So there’s this void in the center, this football-shaped thing, with fish all around it.  Now, any fish that was in the football when you turned it on got stunned, and you’d leave it on for fifteen seconds and it would knock most fish down long enough that you could go collect them, bring them back, measure them on the bottom, tag them and record the information and send it up.

              We did that again with the surface-supplied air gear—eventually we got to being on the bottom with it, and we had the surface-supplied air gear with the communications to the surface.  So you had the diver who was in charge of the operation sitting on the bottom with the communications gear set up the things, and you’d have two SCUBA divers behind him for safety. The lead diver would see when the fish that you wanted to collect were between the electrodes, tell the people on the boat turn the shocker on, and they turned it off when he saw that the fish were stunned and told them to turn it off. Then you would direct one of the divers to go in, collect the fish, bring them back, and the other one could measure.  Then they would record the information, and you’d have another diver so you could collect again.  So we set up this collection system of electro-shocking fish and tagging them and doing population estimates that we could use then to index our transect counts.

              Nobody had ever done that before.  That was one of the problems that the academic community had with monitoring, is it wasn’t interesting research, it wasn’t publishable, there was nothing new about routine monitoring.  We were able to demonstrate with that study and others like that, that we needed to develop the techniques, and that was legitimate research.  What we could do there was really important and it allowed us to evaluate whether or not the techniques they were using in research studies to estimate fish abundance actually worked.  The fact of the matter is, it didn’t, and they needed to know that, and that was really important research that came from the design and development part of monitoring programs.  So we were able to change the mind of people in research and in the academic community, that it was a legitimate role for them to play and that it was something that was important for them to address and to participate in, and it wasn’t just mindless monitoring of water temperature, which was kind of the perception.

  Louter:  So there was, obviously, a lot of fish that were feeling much better psychologically after the electro-shock therapy.

  Davis:  Yes, they were calm.  No lithium for them.  They were doing great.

  Louter:  Did you keep doing that?

  Davis:  We did that for about a year just to establish the relationship between the kinds of things we were doing to count fish.  We were using a number of different techniques.  So we compared the different visual techniques.  We had the video camera.  We had baited stations where we would put this bait out in these containers the fish couldn’t penetrate but had holes in it so they could smell, had squid in it.  So they would come to explore the squid, so we would just sit back from these things on both sides of this bait container.  We had one-meter chains, four one-meter chains, stretched out in the four cardinal directions to circumscribe a circle, so any fish that came within a meter of the bait cup got counted.  So we would sit back and count all the fish that came within one meter of the bait cup each minute for 10 consecutive minutes.  And that works in places where we had very low visibility and you couldn’t see very well when you’re swimming up and down a transect line.  People had been using that technique at the Diablo nuclear power plant near San Luis Obispo.  So the Fish and Game Department said, “Oh, yeah, this is a good technique.  We really like this.”  So we were trying that out. We tested various lengths and widths of visual transects. And we tried timed species counts where the observers searched the entire sampling area, 20 by 200 m, recording the number of each species encountered in one of four categories, one fish, 2-10 fish, 11-100 fish, or more than 100. It’s a technique developed by Jim Bohnsack, NOAA Fisheries in Miami, and now used by REEF (Reef Environmental Education Foundation).

              So what we wanted to do was apply all of those different sampling techniques to the same fish population and see if there were variations among the techniques and which ones were the easiest, cheapest, most reliable ways of doing that business.  What we needed then were some known populations of fishes in different places in different settings.  So we did some at Santa Barbara Island, some at Santa Rosa.  Where else did we do?  I don’t remember.  Somewhere else.  We did three or four sites and did three or four species.

              One of the problems with the video cameras is that some of these brightly colored things like the orange garibaldi, really liked divers.  Nobody ever shoots them because they’re protected as the state marine fish.  They’ll come up to you and then swim around you, so if you’re swimming down a line and counting fish, you know it’s the same fish.  You can see them going back and forth, in and out of view, but just around and around the observers.  You don’t count it over and over again, but if you’re pushing a video camera down a transect line, this fish shows up, pretty soon another one shows up, they’re all about the same size, they’re all orange.  You can’t tell the individuals apart.  You keep counting the same fish over and over again.  Sometimes the fish doesn’t swim around you; it just swims out in front of you or swims back at you, and then you don’t count it but once.  Those sources of variation would kill the video sampling scheme, and that’s what happened.  That’s why we no longer use that as a technique.

  Louter:  Wow.  What are the fishes that are down there that you’re sampling?

  Davis:  There are about a dozen that we focus on, but there are about a hundred that commonly occur in the kelp forest.  So there are sea basses.  There are a whole bunch of rockfishes that are bottom-dwelling long-lived things.  They’re sold as various red snapper or black cod.  They’re about sixty species in the genus Sebastes. So they’re very common.  There are some big wrasses, the California sheephead, and a rock wrass.  There are some grouper-like things, sea basses, some giant sea bass, big fish.  They get to be two meters long and weigh five or six hundred pounds.

  Louter:  These were the ones you were zapping in the—

  Davis:  We didn’t zap any that size.  Those fish are largely gone from the system now because they’ve been removed by fishing.  But we are now seeing recruitment of juveniles of those.  There were a few left, and we’re now seeing recovery of that population, especially at Anacapa Island.

              So there are basses, and then there are little pickers, little guys that live in the water column or they pick at plankton and Chromis and things like that.  There are others that pick at small crustaceans that are in the turf, in the algal turf that grows on the rocks.  So a bunch of those guys, little gobies that are just an inch or two long.  Rather than count those on transects, we count those on the quadrants with the urchins and other things, lay the quadrant down very quietly, and then you sit back and you give it thirty seconds or a minute, and the gobies will all run and hide in holes.  But after you’re not there for a little while, they’ll come out again, so you can get a good count on how many gobies there are.

              So fishes come in lots of shapes and sizes, and some of them are planktivores, some of them are grubbing around in the algae somewhere eating little crustaceans, and some are ambush feeders that eat other fish.  Some of them, like the big California sheephead, I had some pictures somewhere, anyway, eat urchins and abalones and lobsters.  The lobsters eat abalones and urchins, so there’s this competitive interaction.

  Louter:  Are you down there with spear guns and stuff too?

  Davis:  No, we did not do that.  In fact, it was the practice of the park to keep people engaged in diving to take abalone, to spear fish on occasion, and Superintendent Ehorn just wanted people to get to know the underwater part of the park, and that was the way to do it.  So the rangers would go out.  I mean, you had to have something to do.  Before we had the monitoring program, he wanted them to know the park, and so abalone diving was a big deal.  He used to collect abalone and take VIPs out when he was selling the idea of having a national park here, to expand the national monument, and he would go dive, collect abalone.  They would come up and cook them on the boat.  People really loved that experience and it helped buy the park.  Of course, we ran out of abalone in the process.  That’s a minor issue.  We can restore the abalone, I think.  We’re working on that now.  I set a policy for the monitoring program that we would never take game.  We would not do that while we were out.  It was just inappropriate.

  Louter:  There would be no reason to take a spear gun for safety?

  Davis:  No.  Oh, no, no, no.  It’s not a safety issue.  The only reason to take a spear gun would be for collecting, I’d say it’s a good way to collect fish, yes.  But, no, we don’t do that, and we only had one dive in all of the time that I know the program has been running that abalone were taken.  It was when the superintendent came out.  I wanted him to go on some of the cruises, and I could never get five days out of him, but he came out and spent three days with us at San Miguel.  I was out doing some kind of sampling, came back from the dive, and I looked up on the deck.  I was at the water level on the dive step, and I looked at him and there was a pile of abalone on the deck.  He had taken two other guys with him and said, “Oh, yeah, we’ll go off the line somewhere and get abalone,” and came back.  That was the only time we had game taken on one of the monitoring cruises.

  Louter:  This is kind of a dumb question, I guess, but other than the terrestrial inventory monitoring programs, don’t they actually collect things?

  Davis:  Usually not.  Some of the plant folks do if they don’t know the plants, but if you’ve gone through the inventory phase, you have a pretty good idea of what’s out there.  You can usually identify what you have in place, and it’s the same problem with modifying the sites where you’re doing the monitoring.  If you’re collecting things, taking them out of the system, you become a source of variation, a source of change, and if you’re sampling even in general locations, you could begin to start a trend just walking.  You can see a track of only one person walking through a place in the vegetation here for months or years, if you walk when it’s dry. The best time to sample the plants is when they’re in flower, because then it’s easier to identify everything, and that’s in the spring and things are green.  But there are a number of transects that Bill Halvorson established.  You could just see, he just walked down at one time to lay out a tape, walked down and measured it, walked back down and got the tape, walked back down.  So there’s four times up and down this line, and you could see it a year later.  You could see where he had walked through the vegetation.  And that’s a warning that we better be careful about the techniques that we employ.

              We have some similar concerns in the seabird monitoring project.  Some of the birds burrow into these real friable soils that are very loose, and if you walk on it, you collapse all their burrows.  They may be in them during the season.  Because you want to know how many of these burrows are occupied and how many eggs do they have.  You’re looking at that kind of information.  Well, on those slopes, in those conditions, you really can’t sample them, but what people have learned to do is put out nesting boxes so you can build a bench on the slope.  When the birds aren’t there, you can go into the area where the colony will form, and you can put this long bench, maybe twenty feet long, on pipes that you drive into the ground.  So you can walk on the bench and you don’t collapse their burrows, and you can build little boxes that look like burrows and put them under the bench with a lid you can take off.  So you’ve built a burrow, they won’t have to dig it, and they will occupy those nesting boxes.  You can go in, stand on your bench so you’re not collapsing everything, and you can open it up, look how many eggs, how many chicks, who’s home, who’s not, close up again.  So we built a bunch of those.

              There’s a fair amount of invention that goes along with this kind of science, trying to figure out ways to get the information without disturbing the critters, without altering the system.  So part of it is exploration and discovery.  Part of it is invention.  Most of it is problem solving of some kind or another to design these things and make them as foolproof as we can.  That was really the challenge for the monitoring program.

  Louter:  So what’s the next phase of this?  Was there a stage in which you had to talk about your results?  Because somewhere in the mid eighties there, you’re making presentations about what’s going on.  Was that [unclear]?

  Davis:  There were two kinds of things that were going on.  There was a phase of “This is what we think we need to do.  We’ll talk about the plans.”  Then we had to market what we were doing, so we were explaining to people what this design process was like, what we were doing, how we were making these decisions, and what was going to be required to implement this, and what the values would be to park managers, to wildlife managers, to other folks in Department of Fish and Game.  So there was that whole side.  We were making presentations about why we were doing this, came up with the medical analogies, and we get the superintendent to dress up in a white lab coat in front of a meeting on a stage and talk about taking the pulse and the blood pressure of the patient that was played by the park.  We did all kinds of stuff trying to get those ideas across.

              Then the other piece of it was what are the pieces of science that come out of this, like the electro-shocking and the test of different sampling techniques against an actual population estimate in the site.  So there were some pieces of the design that deserved to be published in the literature.  Before we had trends that you could talk about, before you had the information that the monitoring would generate, the real reason for doing the monitoring, we began to work on those kinds of contributions to the scientific literature.  Very early on, in the first five or six years, we began to see precipitous declines in populations of some things and big increases in other things.  Things that were being harvested were in decline.  Things that competed with those species increased as they declined, so red urchins were being taken, abalone were being taken, their populations were in decline.  There were fewer of them, and they were smaller.  The individuals that were left were smaller, whereas the small purple urchins were not being taken.  They competed with the abalone and the red urchins for space and for food, and their populations began to increase dramatically, especially outside of the reserves.  Remember, we had stations inside the reserve and outside.

              Inside the reserve, after El Niño events, kelp would go away and then quickly return.  What would happen, storms would come along that are associated with El Niño.  It breaks open the kelp canopy, and all of those plant fragments drift down to the bottom and become a pulse of food.  So species that can take advantage of that pulse do really well with that.  Then the following year there may not be much kelp canopy that would allow sunlight to reach the bottom, so you’ve got to be able to hold your breath for a while, so to speak, if you depend on shade and kelp for food.  There’s not going to be much food.  There’s a whole lot of food, and then there’s not much food.  Then the kelp gets reestablished, and the following year, usually the second or third year after the El Niño storms, you get canopy back again.  That’s the way the system used to function.

              What we saw happening was that inside the reserve it was still working like that, more or less.  Outside the reserve, the canopy would go away.  There would be a big pulse of food.  There weren’t very many red urchins or abalones, and so the purple urchins would eat all the food and then they’d reproduce.  The following year when the kelp was trying to get reestablished, the bottom was literally carpeted with little purple urchins, little brittle stars, things that were left without competitors and without predators.  The big fish were gone from fishing.  So the little grazers and filter feeders would carpet the bottom, and the kelp couldn’t get reestablished.  It would either get grazed off as soon as it arrived, or the spores, as they were arriving to settle, would get filtered out of the water by the brittle sea stars and other filter feeders.

              So the kelp couldn’t get reestablished, and so places that had once been kelp forest now were just piles of rocks covered with urchins and brittle stars and sea cucumbers.  So the entire kelp forest shifted away.  We came to call those urchin barrens.  So the combination of El Niño and fishing shifted the state of the ecosystem from kelp forests that supported a thousand species to these urchin barrens that might support a hundred species. Urchin barrens didn’t have the biological productivity of the plants, didn’t have the ability to modify local currents and entrain larvae so that populations could sustain themselves in place.  The larvae that were produced would get blown away by the currents.

              So there were huge changes, and what we saw outside of the reserve in Anacapa was that every five to seven years or thereabouts we’d have another El Niño event, and we’d lose a little kelp forest that wouldn’t recover.  Some of them would come back, but some wouldn’t.  So after twenty years of this, we’d had three or four El Niño events, and we’d lost 80 percent of the kelp forest outside of the reserve.  It was gone.  It was replaced with these urchin barrens.

              So as we began to see that pattern emerge, and as we began to see the abalone populations decline from densities of thousands per hectare to hundreds per hectare, to less than ten or twelve per hectare, we began writing papers, doing the analysis, and talking about what’s happening in the system.  It started with the valuable fisheries, abalones and urchins, because we could get more traction.  People cared about that.  If we talked about sea cucumbers, nobody cared.

  Louter:  The scientific community peer-reviewed the material?

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  Did the work contribute to the literature that scientists had been producing, or were these observations of—

  Davis:  No, no, they fit right in with all of the other peer-reviewed literature.  Here’s Abalone of the World.

  Louter:  Because this seems like a basic data that would be interesting.

  Davis:  Oh, it is.  It’s fundamental to what we do, so in stuff like this, in the books, in the peer-review journals, we would present the information and we would use that as a foundation for going to the Department of Fish and Game, to the State of California, formally from the National Park Service and say, “Things are not going very well in this park.  We think that we need to change the policies and practices managing abalone fisheries for pink abalone,” or red abalone or black abalone.  We’d take one species at a time and say, “Look, here’s what we see is going on.  We think we need to change this.  We need to change the size limits.  We need to change the seasons or the bag limits or put some areas off limits.”  We would begin that dialogue.

              But the foundations were these kinds of papers, and they came long before we could put together any understanding of the whole ecosystem and the whole cascading effect of what was going on, and we would propose to them, show the diagram, say, “Well, here are all the things that could be causing change, and here’s what we think is going on.”  So those were the early presentations that we made.

  Louter:  What was the feedback from the folks reviewing the monitoring results?

  Davis:  Usually it was largely technical stuff about how we analyzed things, and did you calculate the variance, and the denominator, was it N or N-minus-1, stuff like that.  Conceptually, there were no real problems, and I tried very hard, for my work and for the others that I was working with, to make sure we didn’t advocate changes in policy in these papers.  We simply report what we saw, and then we could take those observations as verified in the peer-reviewed literature and use those to make recommendations about policy, say, “If this is what’s going on in the environment and here’s the policy, that’s not the outcome we want, maybe we need to change policy.  Because we think we know something about causes, this is how you might make that change.”

  Louter:  Were other scientific studies going on elsewhere that used similar monitoring techniques?

  Davis:  Not very many at that time.  There are now.  There are a lot more now.  Part of what we did here was show that it was feasible, that it was cost-effective.  The Packard Foundation funded a long-term program, large scale, from Oregon to the Mexican border, largely.  It’s called Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of the Coastal Ocean.  The acronym is PISCO.  Ten million dollars for ten years to people at the University of Oregon, University of California, largely, so the Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara campuses of California and Oregon are the principal players, a little bit at U.W., not very much, but they’re expanding.  They’ve been very successful.

              I used as leverage for our monitoring, in addition to the legislation that we had, some papers that people at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the UC San Diego campus—

  Louter:  I was wondering about them.

  Davis:  Paul Dayton and Mia Tegner in particular had been advocating for large-scale long-term studies in the marine environment, and they were studying a kelp forest in Point Loma, and using that as their test case demonstrating that we needed to have these things.  I was able to use that in the academic community for those arguments that this was a legitimate activity for us to take on.  Once you explained that it really was research but if we called it that we couldn’t get it funded, so we had to call it monitoring, then we kind of got over that hump and we could get people on board as collaborators.

              But the results that we published in the peer-reviewed literature, I think largely were well received, as much as any other research that was going in.  We were not reporting on, “This is a monitoring program.”  We were reporting on observations of the dynamics of populations of abalones or urchins or the interactions of these populations with environmental conditions in response to El Niños.  Or we were describing an ecological cascade that occurred when you removed the large predators and the survivors and the prey species had to compete with each other, and then there was competition, and that competition resulted in the loss of biodiversity.  Then those populations that survived were then controlled not by predation or by food, but by disease.  So we talked about how those effects, unintended, cascaded through the system as a result of fishing policies.  That’s what we were describing.  We weren’t saying, “Oh, look, we’re doing this monitoring, and this is what we found.”  We came at the story in an entirely different way.

              What we do in the annual reports is talk about the monitoring.  Its purpose, the purpose of those reports, is to document what you did that year, what your findings were, what were the data, just for that year, not trying to put it in context or to look for trends or patterns, but to document what you did that year, what changes you would make in the methodology that would improve it, new technologies, and you tried something and you sampled both ways.  So you could do those sorts of things.

              The annual reports are also a really important psychological endpoint for this continuous activity of monitoring.  The people who are engaged in it just get worn out.  There’s no end.  It’s the same thing over and over and over.  The annual report puts an exclamation point on it.  It says, “This is what I did for this year, this team of people,” because we have four people, largely, that work on the kelp forest monitoring at the park, and there’s some turnover in that, in the technicians that come on.  So for them to be able to leave and say, “Well, here’s a report, or two reports or three reports, for the years that I was there, that’s what I accomplished,” that endpoint is really important for long-term monitoring.  Otherwise, people just get lost in it and it’s really hard to get them to do the annual reports.  In part, they don’t want to say that they’re done.  It’s been a very interesting thing to watch how that plays out with the different investigators, the different scientists that work in the monitoring programs.  Some of them are really pleased to get it done and say, “Yes, that was an accomplishment.  I’m ready to move on.”  Others are, “Ooh, if I write that report, then I might be—no, I don’t want to be done.  There’s more I can learn next year.”

              I mean, our seabird people, something about that little culture, that subculture, they just don’t want to finish things.  It’s like pulling teeth to get the annual reports out of the seabird people, and we’ve had three of them now that have worked in the program for anywhere from three to five years to one of them was there for twelve years, I think, just did one annual report in twelve years.  I just had to beat her up to get stuff out of her.  It was really hard.  And it was so valuable, really important.

              The monitoring program is designed for the long run, to tell you about long-term trends in the health of the system, the early warnings.  But it has to produce short-term results or it will never survive.  You have to have something in the first year.  You’ve got to at least report what you did and how things went, so you need to have the short-term returns and look for these design-study reports like the electro-shocking stuff and the fish census techniques.  You need to do those in the short term to build confidence in the program so that it survives long enough to give you the long-term stuff that you need.  A number of the people who came into the program, I don’t think recognized that larger-picture purpose.

              The other thing that I can’t figure out is why they couldn’t figure out it was good for their own personal professional development to document what they did and to describe their contributions.  It’s really good for them to be able to say, “I worked on this project for three years.  Here’s what I did.”  Those annual reports are the foundation of that.

  Louter:  So what we’re saying is we don’t have annual reports for all the different monitoring programs.

  Davis:  We’re working in that direction.  There are annual reports for kelp forests.  There are for tide pools.  There are for the beaches and estuaries that have been sampled.  We haven’t had enough money to do the beach sampling every year.  Seabirds, the data are largely in the database, I think.  Pinnipeds are done by NOAA.  That part’s done.  The vegetation on the islands is largely done, but the reports are like biannual.  So it’s variable.  The reports that are available are on the website.  They’re identified.  There’s a good bibliography of the things that have been done.

  Louter:  I’m curious about besides the watershed moments of producing reports then, two things, the development of the program in terms of staffing, who was here to do—you had to staff-up, it seems.

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  And that leads to the administrative question of funding for the programs.  A staff must have money [unclear].

  Davis:  You have to have money to have the staff.  Well, yes, the way that worked was we started with this series of research projects for the design and development of the protocols to make the decisions to go out and do the test sampling to find out how you’re going to do it, and then get that committed to the protocols.  So that funding came in bits and pieces from all sorts of places within the Park Service from the National Marine Sanctuaries program that was brand new at the time.  The National Marine Sanctuary at the Channel Islands was created in September of 1980, so it was a brand-new player.  The sanctuary program was authorized in 1972, but they didn’t get anything in place on the ground until 1975 in Key Largo.  So it was a growing program and a very small program within NOAA.

              In 1980, they were just trying to hit their stride in getting a little bit of money that they could put toward places, but they had no staff on the ground.  So in February of ’81, the sanctuary program manager, Nancy Foster, came out here to talk to people about marine sanctuaries on the West Coast, and she came by the park to say hi.  I’d known her from days in Florida.  She came by.  I introduced her to the superintendent, and we were talking about this great place.  She and her deputy, John Eptig, had never seen the sanctuary.  It was established.  They had reports.  They had pictures.  But they had never seen the sanctuary.  And Ehorn was just the most enthusiastic guy you’ll ever meet.  He said, “Oh, you’ve got to see the sanctuary.”

              They said, “Well, we’ve got to get to LAX and catch a plane.  We’re going back to D.C.” da, da, da.

              He said, “No, you can’t leave without seeing the sanctuary.”  He called his friends down at Channel Islands Aviation, chartered a plane that he paid for out of park funds, and we flew them over the sanctuary, over the islands, so they could say they’d been here, they’d seen it.  That was the kind of thing that he did that was fabulous marketing.  The NPS and NOAA Sanctuaries were best of buddies from then on.  We’d shown them their sanctuary.

              So I reduced the plan that we had of the twelve elements that we needed for monitoring here down to one page.  It was called a step-down diagram.  It starts with goals at the top, shows the conceptual model, the design of monitoring protocols, and then implementation and all the steps that are required to do that.  At the bottom was these twelve boxes that needed to be taken care of.

  Louter:  That’s what step-down is?

  Davis:  That’s the step-down, yes.  What it said, it’s a logical construct, actually, that says if these are the goals, what do I need to do to achieve those?  So the next test is, okay, on the next level in the diagram you say, “If and only if I do this and this and this, can I achieve these goals.”  So if I want to know the health of the ecosystems and get early warnings and be able to measure the normal variation in the system, then I have to have a conceptual model of the system and know how it works, how I think it works, I have to be able to monitor those things, and I have to be able to analyze the data and report on it.  If and only if I do those three things, then I’ll achieve those goals.

              If I want to develop a conceptual model, then you can come down and say, “Here are all the steps for a conceptual model.”  If I want to do the monitoring, oh, I have to make some selections of what I want to monitor, and I have to know how to do it, and I have to hire people to do that.  So you work your way down, so each layer in the diagram steps down to the very bottom.  You can stop it arbitrarily anywhere, but at some point it loses its information; it gets too detailed.  If you went all the way to the bottom and said, “Well, in order to do this, I have to measure purple urchins to the nearest millimeter,” no.  Way too much detail.  So you can stop way before that.

              But the point is, you can get on one eight-and-a-half by eleven-inch piece of paper all of the steps, all of the projects, all of the programs that are required in order to conceptualize, develop, test, and implement the monitoring program.  I can take that piece of paper around and say, “I’ve got these people are going to buy these boxes.  Will you buy those boxes?”  And I took it to the sanctuary program, “Look, we need a data management system.”  I couldn’t get the Park Service to buy that computer.  They wouldn’t do it.  But I purchased from a company in Seattle a data management system for the monitoring program that included this Apple 2e computer.

  Louter:  What’s that company called?

  Davis:  That’s a good question.

  Louter:  Microsoft, I guess, that they were using.

  Davis:  No, it wasn’t Microsoft.  It was somebody’s brother-in-law at the National Marine Fisheries Service.  I forgot what that was about.  He was a really clever guy, and so I got him to give me the software, you know, the whole thing, and so that it ran, and he actually gave me databases that I could fill out, and that’s what we acquired.  To make that work, I had acquired this computer.  But for me to go through the Park Service procurement office and buy the little microcomputer was not allowed.  So I acquired this thing, and I used, not Park Service money, I used National Marine Sanctuary money to do that.  So I got them to give the Park Service the money to do that and acquired the data management system.  So I sold the sanctuary program, data management of pinnipeds, which were NOAA fisheries responsibility anyway, so sanctuaries program within NOAA paid NOAA fisheries to develop the protocol for pinniped monitoring.  They paid for the seabird monitoring, the things that I was able to take to Nancy and John and say, “Well, here are all the things we need to do.  What parts of this do you think you could afford to contribute to?”  And they bought pieces of it.

              They paid for one of the five years of the kelp forest monitoring design study.  I got year-end money from the regional office for the first year of the kelp forest monitoring.  So I got money on the, I don’t know, fifteenth or twentieth of July to be spent by the first of October to start the fieldwork, to go out and select the sites and drill the holes and put in the transect lines.  Now, I knew where I wanted to go because I’d already been out and doing these exploratory things with people at the university and the Department of Fish and Game, but I didn’t get the money to actually do it until the end of July, and we had to install the drilling equipment on the park boat and hire the people for the Park Service side of it.  I had to hire three people.

              Then when we got down to it, we did six consecutive weeks on the boat.  We would leave on Monday morning and go out and dive for five days and come in on Saturday, clean everything out, go out and buy the groceries for the next week, and Sunday, provision the boat and have it all ready to go so Monday morning when all of our divers from the other agencies and the universities showed up, we’d put them on board and we’d go out.  I worked six straight weeks with the three guys that I hired to get that done in August and September.

  Louter:  Spending year-end—

  Davis:  Spending year-end money to get it started.  But it was a matter of trust.  The superintendent had put his reputation on the line and said, “If you give Gary the money, he’ll spend it.”  The regional office said, “This is research we want done,” and the financial people, it was actually Patty Neubacher’s predecessor, Hy Patton, who came up with the money, like $40,000, $45,000, said, “Okay, let’s see what you can do with that.”

              We did that.  We had that established.  Now we have these sites out there.  There was some obligation to continue with that work, and so the regional office came up with money in their Natural Science Studies Program to fund the next year, and I actually got a commitment of that money probably in February or March, and so I was able to go out and recruit some biologists.  I had been using largely volunteer ranger divers from all over the Service, networking, talking to people.  This is a great training exercise for the divers, especially the rangers, because they needed to make at least a dozen dives every year to maintain their certification, and I could promise them twenty dives in a week.  We’d do four a day for five days, and they’d get great experience.

              We were hauling hydraulic drills around on the bottom and drilling holes.  It was all engineering.  There was no biology, you know.  It was all about locating the sites, stretching out these lines on the bottom, with the tires filled with cement as anchors on both ends.  So we were deploying stuff and picking stuff up and going out and drilling holes and using underwater epoxy, two-part epoxy.  It had to be mixed underwater and stuck in the hole, and then you put these stainless-steel I-bolts in.  So we had to order all the epoxy, all the underwater gear to apply it and put in the bolts.  We had to go buy the stainless-steel bolts.  I mean, it was a huge exercise in logistics.

              The rangers are really good at that, so that’s what I used them for.  So I’d have four rangers show up from Lake Mead and Point Reyes and all over the western region, these guys that show up, two or three at a time, and I might have a couple people from the university just come to help.  We’d go put in the lines.  We got it down to the point we could put in a hundred-meter line, drill eleven holes, put in the stakes, run the lead line out.  The lead line’s heavy.  A hundred meters of lead line must weigh about ninety pounds, a hundred pounds.  So you couldn’t just pick it up in a bag.  And if you got to the bottom with it, you were going to struggle with it.  But we got to the point where if you cut it in ten-meter segments on the boat, carry them down and then sort it out, or you take the whole roll down there with a broom handle through it, and walk down the line and just peel it off as you go to the end of the line.  We tried all of that stuff.

              But we got to the point we put in a line in twenty-one minutes.  We had eight divers.  In twenty-one minutes we could put in a hundred-meter line, drill the eleven holes, put the epoxy into the stakes, and run the lines, tie the knots, and bring all the equipment up back to the boat again.  In the beginning, it took us about six hours to put in a line, and we got it down to twenty minutes.

  Louter:  [unclear]?

  Davis:  No.

  Louter:  Where did they go?  They anchored down the—

  Davis:  Well, initially when we were just selecting the sites, remember I said we went out and we picked all the sites that we thought were possible, and we flagged that with just plastic flagging.  Then we said okay, and we randomly selected the sites.  We went back and we put in these tires at a hundred meters apart, and we stretched a polypropylene line between them, just as a template to do the drilling so we’d know, as we were going along on the bottom with this drill that weighs about eighty pounds and it’s got two big hydraulic hoses connected to the boat behind you.  So you’ve got it over your shoulder, and you’re walking along on the bottom, [demonstrates], and you come to the flagging.  We tied flagging on the polypropylene rope every ten meters, so you’d come to the flag and then you’d look for a flat place of solid rock that you could drill in with this rock hammer and put a hole in and drop a stake in it.  Then another crew would come behind you with the epoxy and another crew behind that with the lead line and apply the lead line to each one of them.

              So we had this thing sequenced.  You send the drillers down first, and they start drilling and working their way along.  Then you send the next team down, give them fifteen or twenty minutes.  You send the next team down.  Well, when we learned to do it, we put the drillers in the water and four minutes later you’d put in the next team, and four minutes later the next team.  So at the end of twenty minutes, you were done.  You’d worked your way up.

              Now, sometimes drill would get stuck in the hole, hit a really hard rock.  It’s not easy to drill in rock.  Depends on what kind of rock, you know.  If you get just the right rock, everything’s working.  Then there were times when, yes, it took us all day to put in a line.  [unclear].

  Louter:  Did they have to drill in a straight line?

  Davis:  More or less, yes.  The idea was that it was pretty close to the same place, but you could vary, you know, a couple of feet either way.

  Louter:  They’re going along a polypropylene line.

  Davis:  Yes, you’re going along a polypropylene.  That’s the guide that takes you along, and then you have to go pick up the polypropylene.  We didn’t want to leave that.  We left them down the first year because we didn’t know if the whole thing was going to survive.  We thought, well, at least we’ll know where the tires were.  Well, come the next year, most of the tires got blown away in the winter storms, and the winter storms here are really ferocious, and they’ll roll around rocks the size of a Volkswagen at sixty feet.  So it’s a pretty dynamic environment.  It can change a lot.

              But the basic design came from the Department of Fish and Game.  They had not drilled the holes.  They had just laid the lead line on the bottom, and that worked for them.  I had drilled holes in the coral reefs at Tortugas and Biscayne and put in stainless-steel stakes, so I knew that was a good technique.  So we combined those two, their lead line and my stainless-steel stakes, and that’s something that’s pretty good.  It’s on cyclic maintenance, so it’s in the Park Service system, so about 10 percent of the lines have to be replaced each year.  We now have thirty-two sites.  We put in sixteen initially.  When the new reserves were created in 2003, we applied for and got funding and doubled the number of sites so we could better resolve the differences inside and outside of the new reserves.

  Louter:  I’m just imagining how did the lines come apart.  Storms?

  Davis:  Yes, storms.  They’d wear back and forth, so the line actually goes back and forth and chafes.  Or somebody will drag an anchor across it, occasionally, not very often.  But things like that, yes.

  Louter:  Speaking of divers, though, we talked about the rangers [unclear], there’s that whole submerged cultural resources unit.

  Davis:  Yes.  Lenihan and Murphy.

  Louter:  Did they ever come out and do anything in this area, do archaeological surveys?

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  Would they survey the kelp forest?

  Davis:  No.  No, they were looking at wrecks and did some training exercises out here.  I worked with them a lot.  We’ve tried to figure out how we could take advantage of being underwater together.  On the USS Arizona and in Dry Tortugas we worked at trying to figure out how we could provide guidance to people about if you have an endangered species living on a wreck and they want to excavate it, how do we deal with that?  Or if they have a wreck that’s under a coral reef, when can they excavate?  Or if there is a really special wreck that is really unique in its significance, the biologists shouldn’t grow things over the top of it.  We should remove the fouling communities.  Like the Arizona, when should we remove the corals from it?  Because it’s damaging the wreck.

  Louter:  What do they call those, bivalves or [unclear]?

  Davis:  Yes, they’re biofouling.

  Louter:  And what does that refer to?

  Davis:  Stuff that’s growing, the bio part, and fouling is just stuff that grows on the ships, and it chemically eats away at the steel or at the wood, and just the weight of it hanging eventually could get to it, and it creates a wider surface area for surge, for waves and currents that eventually will wear the metal.  So if the metal’s just on the side of the hull, the water goes by.  But if you start growing something out on it and then it starts working it back and forth, pretty soon it breaks the hull and things start to fall apart faster.  So at what point do we start clearing the biofouling off?  How do we make those kinds of tradeoffs?  So we worked with them on those things and on diving techniques, done some surveys together.  I went with Lenihan up to Jenny Lake at Grand Teton once to figure out what had happened.

  Louter:  Really?

  Davis:  Yes.  Some recreational divers in Jackson Hole had come up to Jenny Lake and were diving and they were swimming around, and they found all these trees growing, apparently.  They were in a growth position on the bottom of the lake in sixty or eighty feet of water.  Their interpretation was that some block of earth had dropped into the lake, or had dropped and the lake had covered it up, but they felt that one earthquake event had dropped this block of earth with the trees growing on it, these big spruce trees growing on it.  If that were true, then the Jackson Lake Dam was not secure, that if there were earthquakes of that magnitude in this area, the dam could break, and they all lived downstream.  They were really worried.

              The superintendent was the former superintendent at Everglades and knew me, knew Dan Lenihan, called us up and said, “Hey, what’s going on?  Tell me about this.”

              We went up and spent a couple of days diving in Jenny Lake and found that there were indeed trees.  There were lots of them, hundreds of them, on the bottom of the lake.  Only a few of them were actually upright.  Most of them were down like jackstraws.  Most of the trees that were upright were at the bottom of an avalanche chute, and the trees, as it turns out, were coming down the slopes with avalanches and they had stones in their root balls, so when they’d get in the lake they’d float around upright, because the stones at the bottom would keep them upright until they got waterlogged and then they would settle to the bottom and the sediments would accumulate around the base of the tree.

              So it looked like a forest, but as you started excavating, you found out there were hundred of trees under it that didn’t have rocks in their root balls and had just fallen in the lake.  So it looked like this block had fallen, but we were able to explain what had happened and what was going on and everybody was probably safe downstream from it.  So we’ve had some good experiences with the cultural resource folks.

  Louter:  That’s interesting.  Until you talked about the rangers coming to get their diving time in, I hadn’t thought about that crew and what they [unclear].

  Davis:  Yes, and those are also good investments in long-term projects that you will want to have funded at a national level.  Bill Schenk was one of the divers who worked with me at Dry Tortugas.  J.T. Reynolds was one of the divers who came out here and helped us with this Kelp Forest Monitoring project.  So those people move up in the organization, and when I was going to the NLC to pitch the need for long-term monitoring programs, I’m pitching it to one of the guys that helped me establish the program.  It helps to engage lots of people for lots of reasons.

  [Begin File 6]

  Davis:  So one of my favorite dive safety, “How did you survive that?” stories was during the Tektite program.  We were getting ready for Tektite.

  Louter:  This is in the Virgin Islands?

  Davis:  The Virgin Islands at Lameshire Bay, and we were tagging spiny lobsters and we wanted to know how far they walked at night searching for food.  We wanted to know how they organized themselves socially in these dens that they hang out in the coral reef in the daytime, and at night they go out on the grass flats and forage for food, looking for snails and urchins and things that they bring back to the dens and eat during the daytime.  Sometimes they stay out on the reef and eat at night.

              We wanted to know those kinds of things, and so we’re putting little radio tags on their backs so that we could follow around, kind of a sonar thing.  So we’re tracking these lobsters to see how far they go and what areas they search, and it’s dark.  It’s night.  They’ve gone out to forage at night, so we’re out here on the grass flats at night and we’re following the sounds of the lobster tags as they move around.

  Louter:  They’re in the water.

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  And you’re on the land.

  Davis:  No, we’re in the water too.  We’re in the water on the bottom at night with this little—it looks like a ray gun of some kind, but it’s a sonar receiver that you can point.  It’s directional, so you can, “Okay, I hear the tag.  It’s over in that direction.”  The closer you get, the louder it gets.  You may never see the lobster, so you don’t alter their behavior, but you know where they went and how far they got and where they turn and they go back to the reef.  So we’d be out there for hours at a time following these things around.

              One night this lobster went just wandering around, doing the normal stuff, and all of a sudden it went “zip,” and it went like a hundred meters.  It went out of range.  I would swim, swim, swim, swim, swim, and I could just barely hear it.  Then, whom, it would go back a hundred meters the other direction [demonstrates].  What the hell is going on?  And then we lost it.  So we gave up for the night.

              When we went out the next morning and started looking around, looking by sound.  We have a hydrophone in the boat, so we can just drive around and try to find the tag.  So we’re checking out the reef where they usually go back to and hang out.  Not there, so we start checking the reef around the corner.  We go maybe a half a mile from the place where we had released it and we heard the tag again.  So we jumped in the water to see where it was, and laying on the bottom where we were hearing the sound were six big nurse sharks.  They were anywhere from six or seven to eight or nine feet long, laying on the bottom.  Guess what?  They ate our lobster.  I said, “Well, this may be a million-dollar project, but those are expensive tags, and we want our tag back.”

              So we went back to get a bang stick, which is a shotgun shell at the end of a pole with a pin above it, and if you jam it on the top of a shark’s head, it explodes and kills the fish.  People use them to kill big fish or sharks.  For a while people used to carry them around trying to protect themselves from sharks, but it was kind of silly.  They hurt themselves more often than they hurt the sharks.  It’s dangerous, having shotgun shells ready to go off.

              But we had one.  The Navy divers had them, so we borrowed their bang stick, and we had a 16-millimeter movie camera.  It was an Arra Flex in a big aluminum housing, so it probably weighed about 150 pounds, about that wide and about that long.  We’re going to film this whole thing.  We’re going to document our going out to retrieve the lobster and the lobster tag inside this shark, and demonstrate that they do indeed eat them, which is kind of silly.  We already knew that.  All you have to do is catch the shark, cut it open, and lobsters come out.  But drama.  Life magazine was out there shooting.  The whole thing was documented by Life magazine.  It was a big deal.

  Louter:  Were they out there for the lobster project?  Were they out there for [unclear]?

  Davis:  They were out there for the Man and the Sea Project, the Tektite project.  This was like the space race.  This was a big deal.  We were going to inner space.  The Russians were coming in their submarines.  We needed to put underwater bases around the continental margin of the United States to protect us from the cold war.  This is the race for the moon.  People landed on the moon six months after we were doing this project, so we were aquanauts and they were astronauts.  It was a big deal in National Geographic and then Life magazine.

  Louter:  Wow.  Was this past the time you spent the sixty days under—

  Davis:  Same project.  That was the project.  We were on the surface.  This was before we’d started the mission.  During the mission, we had four people in the habitat and three people that stayed out and did comparative studies surrounding it.  We wanted to find out is it cost-effective to live in the habitat and be able to work outside all the time, or would you be more efficient actually working from the surface, doing the same kind of work.  So I tagged lobsters from the surface for a while outside, and then we tagged inside from the habitat to make that comparison.

              So that time, I was working outside the habitat.  We went out to retrieve the tag.  The guy I was with, the other guy on the team, took the bang stick, and I had the camera and I followed him down.  We started at the surface and we dove down.  These sharks are like telephone poles laying on the bottom.  We’d determined earlier which one had the tag in it by holding the receiver up to each of the sharks.  He went down, and he was going to kill that one, and he planted the bang stick on the back of the shark’s head, and it didn’t go off.  He pole-vaulted, and it just hit, and his forward momentum carried him over it, and as he rolled over, his feet went down and the shotgun shell came up between his feet, you know, the business end of the bang stick.

              So he kind of rolled over on his back, and the shark that got hit on the back of the head went up off the bottom and turned around, and the other sharks got up, and they didn’t know what they were doing.  It’s just pandemonium.  Most of them turned around and came right back toward me.  So I was getting great pictures, but I’ve got five sharks that are nine feet long running right at me.  [laughs]  Holy cow.  So I’m taking pictures of them and I pushed down.  They weren’t attacking me; they were just running at me, and they were just big.  I hit it on the nose with the camera, and it turned me over, I rolled over and I’m still filming.  I’m looking back this way.  So now I’m looking this way, and the guy with the bang stick is behind me, and I hear it go off.

              What had happened is one of the sharks had gotten up and come close to him, so he’s laying on his back with the bang stick like this, between his feet, and he goes “Bam!” like that, and it goes off this time.  I don’t think it hurt the shark, but it scared it, because it was a glancing blow, and there was enough power it blew the guy’s fins off.  Didn’t hurt him either, but fins are going off in this direction, sharks are going everywhere.  Yeah, we didn’t get the tag back, and the Navy dive safety officer was very upset with us.

  Louter:  I bet he was.

  Davis:  Yes.  And we survived it.  You’ve got to wonder how and why.

              Yes, that’s one of the park boats.  Let’s see.  Ranger 2.

  Louter:  That’s your most harrowing experience with a shark?

  Davis:  Yes.  Sharks really aren’t that big a deal for most divers.  I mean, they’re just big fish, other than the Great Whites that make mistakes and think people are seals.  Usually, they bite and release.  They’re just kind of exploring their environment.  So most shark attacks are pretty much accidents.

              I’ve been in the water with hundreds of sharks at the Galapagos and the Red Sea, schools of hammerheads.  They’re no different than any other fish, swim around, look at you, and move on.  If you invade territories, there are gray nurse sharks in the Pacific that are pretty aggressive.  If you’re paying attention, they will tell you that they’re upset through their behavior and posturing, unlike bears.  If you’re paying attention, then you say, “Oh, it’s your place.  I’m leaving.”  That resolves the problem.

              I’ve had more trouble with big groupers.  It’s called Goliath grouper now.  They used to be called Jewfish in the Dry Tortugas..  But they’re like the giant sea bass out here.  Because there wasn’t very much fishing at Dry Tortugas, there were a lot of those big fish.  They’d be five, six feet long, weigh three, four, five hundred pounds.  And they eat lobsters.  I was doing lobster surveys, so I was going to each lobster den.  I’d identified all the dens, the places that lobsters hang out on the reef, and I’d do a census of each of those dens.  So I’ve got a clipboard in one hand and a pencil, and I learned to carry a ski pole with me for poking lobsters in dens so you could move them around.  If you try and touch them, they go bananas and disappear and all kinds of bad things happen, but they’ll let you hit them with a stick and you can move them around, so you can sort them out and count them back in the den.  So I’ve got a little ski pole on my wrist.

              So I’m going around and looking, and I notice that it got dark when I looked in the den, more than it should have.  I looked back, and there was this great big grouper looking in the den at me, and he followed me to the next one, followed me to the next one.  The next one I got to, he grabbed my fin and pulled me back out.  On the next one, I had a short-sleeved wetshirt on, and he grabbed me by the elbow and pulled my elbow back, turned me around.  I got pissed, and I reached up with the clipboard and hit him on the head.  He backed up and then he started to get really aggressive.  They make a popping sound.  I noticed this little one was only five feet long, I guess.  But in the murk behind him was a really big grouper, about twice that size.  Well, I mean, not quite.  It might have been seven feet long.  But they get really big girth when they get a little bit longer.

  Louter:  What kind of teeth do they have?

  Davis:  They’re not big sharp teeth, but they crush.  They take like abalone, these abalone shells, they’ll get one of those and they just glom onto it and crush it with their mouth.  Then the shell and the heavy material falls out through their gills, and the meat goes down the gullet.  So they just grab stuff.  They’re very powerful.  They just suck the lobsters out of the hole.  So it’s not like they’re going to eat you, but they’re very powerful.  They’re very large, very powerful, and really fast, really quick.  So they could grab hold of you and just dislocate a shoulder or push you into the hole or whatever, just being aggressive.  So I’ve had more trouble with groupers while I was doing those surveys.  That one was probably the worst.  We got out of the water.  I said, “No, I’m not fooling with that.  I’ll come back here later.  I can finish the survey another time.  I don’t need that.”

  Louter:  They didn’t follow you up?

  Davis:  No.  They’re just interested in the lobsters, and I think it was really kind of a territorial thing about “You’re messing with my food.”  It wasn’t even curiosity about us as divers.

  Louter:  Nothing out here on the Channel Islands?

  Davis:  There are large groupers.  These giant sea bass are the same way, but they are so rare today.  They were common when I began diving in the 1960s, early sixties, in San Diego, used to see them frequently there, but spear fisherman got them, largely, and some hook-and-line fishermen as well.  They’re pretty rare.  They’re pretty old.  So once you take the big ones out, it takes a long time to replace them.

  [Begin File 7, date June 12, 2007]

  Louter:  We’ve got six hours left.

  Davis:  Okay.  We can fill up some of that today.

              So we’ve talked about the design of the monitoring program, starts with goals, the conceptual model, the development of the protocols, and that’s all in a research mode.  Eventually, you get to the implementation.  So the fourth step of the program development is an implementation plan and a passing from the research and development phase into operations.  At some point, each of the protocols, rather than a whole program, we were doing this piecemeal as we could fund the protocol development, and then when we finished it, we would move it into operations.  The first one to move was the kelp forest monitoring.  So when we had finished with the design, it was time for the park to take that on, and the park got some funding from the regional office.

  Louter:  That would be key, wouldn’t it, how you keep a program going after design, where does the funding come from.

  Davis:  Where does it come from, and it needs to go into the park base.  It’s going to last for a very long time.  It’s just like opening up a Visitors Center, putting up a flag and taking out the trash.

  Louter:  So did it?

  Davis:  It did, yes, with good support from the regional office and from the park and adjusting its priorities and saying that’s an important thing that we want to do.

              One of the things that eased that transition is that somebody who had been working as one of the lead biologists in the research and development phase became the program manager in the beginning.  That was Dan Richards, and he’s still here in the park.  So his whole career, Park Service career, has been here at Channel Islands, first as the logistical technician on the kelp force monitoring project, and then as one of the lead biologists, and then became the marine program manager.

  Louter:  When he and other were working on the design program, were they NPS employees?  Were they hired [unclear]?

  Davis:  They were NPS employees.  They were not permanent.  They were seasonal or term employees.  Then the park picked Dan up and began implementation, and I moved on to seeking more funding.  The national program, at that point we were trying to move the whole program into a national focus and find funding for Channel Islands as a prototype program.  We had developed and were starting to implement that strategy.  Let’s use the Channel Islands-Shenandoah as prototypes to show other parks, to show the Park Service and other agencies that this was a cost-effective way of improving stewardship.  So my effort then was to finish the other protocols in the marine environment.

              By then, Bill Halvorson was here.  He was the second research scientist the Park Service assigned to Channel Islands.    He took over all the terrestrial things.  He was a plant ecologist, so he supervised all of the terrestrial stuff.  In the beginning, I was trying to do them all.  It was overwhelming.  So bringing Bill in was really key to our success.

  Louter:  Who did that?

  Davis:  It was a series of happenstance of reorganization in the Washington office, and he’d been working in the landmarks, the natural landmark program, and in their reorganization, they were reducing the number of positions they had.  We got two of them.  We got our first truly professional chief of resource management.  When I got here, the park didn’t have a chief of resources.  They reassigned a management assistant to do that work.  When the landmarks program was reorganized, the chief of the landmarks program, Frank Ugolini came to Channel Islands as the chief of natural resources.

              Bill Halvorson, they were also looking for a place for Bill, and flew him out to Santa Rosa Island.  We sat out there, and we were doing a biological survey of the island for the land protection plan.  So I had scientists from universities and all over the region out on the island doing their various specialties for birds and foxes and vegetation.  So I was able to show him a real field operation.  It was pretty impressive, actually.  We had basically unlimited funds for helicopters, so we were flying people all over the island, putting them at the top of a canyon.  They’d walk down, we’d pick them up, fly to the next canyon.  So in five days, we did a very thorough survey of a 54,000-acre island.  So I was able to show him that and say, “This is a really exciting place.  I really need your help at implementing the design and development phase of the monitoring program.”  So he was convinced it was a good thing to do.  So he was looking for a new home, and so we had an FTE, and I guess part of the salary came to the original science program when he came out here.

  Louter:  Not the way they do it today.

  Davis:  No, we haven’t done anything like that in a while.  It’s sort of like when we absorbed the HCRS, those kinds of things.  It was just an opportunity.  There were some really talented people available, and we were prepared.  We knew what we needed, what we wanted, and the superintendent was willing to say, “Yes, I’ll provide an office and space and administrative support for another person,” so we were able to get that person here.

              We began a series of transactions, protocol by protocol, and then we were successful eventually in getting the national program established in prototypes as a national strategy that I talked about yesterday, that three-pronged effort with the book and the inventories and then these ten or eleven prototype programs.  It was ten, because we decided that that was our best strategy, and we solicited proposals from the parks, said, “If you want to be a prototype monitoring program, give us a proposal.  We’re going to compete them, and we’ll fund them as we get the money and the increases.”

              What happened is that we got eleven really good proposals, and we couldn’t separate the eleventh one.  So what we had was, actually, two in the same biome.  We had Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains were both in that eastern deciduous forest, and we were trying to get ten different places, Great Plains and Alaska and the tropics and the Virgin Islands.  So we were looking for a variety of different places, and here were two.  But they were such good proposals, we couldn’t reject them, so we had to dig a little deeper and have eleven prototype programs.

  Louter:  Were there any up in the Northwest parks?

  Davis:  Yes, two, Olympic and North Cascades.  We wanted one that had lots of water in it, and that was North Cascades, lakes and streams and stuff like that.  It was in the same geographic area, but it was quite different than Olympic.  Olympic was kind of that north coast forest, big park, ancient forest.  So that was that biome.  Those two were not funded as prototypes until the National Resource Challenge, because we were trying to get ten million dollars, and a million to each of the prototypes, and it never really got there.

  Louter:  The million dollars would have been for a set period of time with the idea being—

  Davis:  It would have been in the base to go.  One of the other things that we tested with the prototype program was kind of the administrative procedures and what happens.  I had a very strong background and a belief in the value of having these programs park-based as opposed to having them in regional offices or in the Washington office.  The Washington office people, Abby Miller in particular, were very leery of putting money in park bases, because she said, “It’s going to evaporate, it’ll disappear into another divisions and other kinds of work, and it’s really hard for us to make sure it stays focused on monitoring.”

              So we said, “Well, let’s test it.”  So we put the money in park bases, and, sure enough, at Channel Islands it disappeared into other places, and that’s why we have the Vital Signs program organized as it is today, to protect the integrity of the funding source.  So it’s given to a board of directors composed of the superintendents, so they still have a great deal of say about how that money is spent, but there is centralized control, so that if the money starts to wander off, it can be brought back to bear on the central issue for monitoring.

              So that was one of the other things that we tested.  In addition to the science, it was culture and the structure of the organization required to sustain a long-term monitoring program.  There’s huge pressure.  When you’re doing the monitoring, you’re identifying these issues that need to be addressed, like the fox populations on the islands took a nosedive.  A lot of pressure to, say, “Well, stop monitoring.  Fix the broken fox population.  Keep them from going extinct.  Stop monitoring, because we need the money to fix it.”  So there’s a lot of pressure to fix things.  There’s never any pressure to monitor and find more problems.  Who wants to find more problems?

              So you need to insulate the monitoring funding from operations and from restoration activities so that it doesn’t get absorbed.  We have so much need in the park system for fixing the broken stuff that it will consume everything we have in all of our capacity.  But if we don’t monitor, if we don’t get the early warnings, if we don’t look over the horizon, the problems will become insurmountable.  We have to identify them early.  The first invasive species that arrive are easy to get rid of.  After they’ve taken over half the park, it may not be possible.  After populations go extinct, it may not be possible to regain them.  We need to get the early warnings to be able to do that.  So the monitoring program has to be able to do that.  We recognize that need.  At the same time, if you commingle the funds and the people with day-to-day operations, that’s the first thing that gets cut off.  So that was one of the other things we learned in the prototype business.

  Louter:  Did you ever recover the money from the Channel Islands?

  Davis:  Kate would say no, and she knows.  I think we probably got some of it back into monitoring.

  Louter:  In terms of the people who are working on the program?

  Davis:  Yes.  Well, we estimated here would be $822,000 in 1987, 1986, something like that, and the park eventually got in 1993, so six or seven, eight years later, in a period of relatively high inflation, actually, got $600-and-some-thousand.  So it got less than we thought it required and quite a bit later, so costs had gone up.  So we probably got two-thirds, three-quarters of what was required to actually run the program as it was designed.  Attrition, as in all things, at this point fifteen years later makes it pretty hard to keep implementing all of the stuff as designed, even with increases in efficiency from technology and that sort of stuff.

  Louter:  So does the money mostly go towards salary?

  Davis:  Yes.  We didn’t have enough money.  Superintendent Mac Shaver had enough wisdom to look down the road, even before we did business plans and projected those kinds of numbers.  They had the good sense to say, “You know, we shouldn’t commit all of this to salaries.  We need to hold some back to have some flexibility.”

              The other thing that they chose to do was to integrate the monitoring program completely into operations.  There was no Resource Management Division.  There was a chief and a monitoring program.  So it was a very small park and had been growing.  The major part of it was grown with the research that I was doing in developing the monitoring program.  That was it.  But the capacity to be able to get rid of alien species, such as rats, pigs, and sheep, or to restore things or to do environmental compliance just didn’t exist in the park.  So there was a lot of pressure to take some of the monitoring money and turn it into “get rid of the rats” projects.  It wasn’t just, “Oh, we’re going to go over and do education programs,” or buy more ranger stuff or do more boat patrols.  It wasn’t that at all.  It was just trying to build a competent park from scratch.

              So, yes, there were a lot of good reasons that decisions were made, but Mac and Kate decided to integrate the monitoring with the other functions of resource management, as opposed to having a separate standalone organization.  That has the virtue of protecting the program from being vandalized, because as the national monitoring program grew and we changed the funding model, it was virtually impossible to look into the Channel Islands budget and figure out where did the monitoring money go.  Because you had one wildlife biologist who was running projects to restore foxes, but he was also the guy responsible for monitoring foxes and doing the monitoring.  So what part of his time needs to be funded out of the national office?  You can see the nightmare that that would create, trying to tease it back out.  So they had so effectively integrated it, the monitoring with other resource management operations with rangers, with education, that you couldn’t pull it back out again.  So it stays an anomaly in the Vital Signs program, and that money truly is in the park base, and most of it has been restored.

  Louter:  So it makes auditing the program from Washington a little difficult because they can’t see where the money is.

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  But at the same time, it sounds like it has some protection in the park.

  Davis:  Yes, it does.  Yes, in the park, it does.  So there are tradeoffs there, and it was a prototype.  We learned from that experience.  Then, of course, the new model is that we’re going to have networks of parks working together, so we have Santa Monica and Cabrillo that worked together with Channel Islands in trying to figure out what money is actually in that program that can be shared, has been a challenge as well.  Yes, it’s a challenge.

              Part of the money, the flexibility they held out was for information management.  We didn’t hire a data manager for the monitoring program.  We contracted with local people who knew Microsoft Access, and they were really good, and we could get the best people to do the various aspects of GIS and those sorts of things.  But what happened was as salaries rose and budgets stayed flat, we would just get fewer and fewer hours of the consultant’s time to do the data management, so biologists began doing more and more of the information management over time.  But it was done in a gradual kind of incremental way, so that it wasn’t terribly painful and it seems to have worked out reasonably well.

              Turns out that information management is a huge part of a monitoring program, much larger than anybody had anticipated in the outset.  The Canadian Academy of Sciences was asked to make an estimate for Parks Canada and others about how much should be budgeted for information management.  They estimated 10 to 15 percent of the monitoring program budget.  It turns out in our experience here it’s 35 to 40 percent.  So they really missed it.  And most people estimated 10 percent or thereabouts, but when you look at all the information that you collect and the dynamics of the software and hardware and how the operating systems change and the software packages change and every time that happens, you have to update everything in the database to keep it going and generate the reports, it’s a lot of effort.  It’s worth it.  You can do things now that were just virtually impossible a decade before.  It’s just amazing the capacity that you have with a desktop computer and our little network, and the power to analyze information is unbelievable.  It’s beyond the capacity of a whole institute in the 1960s, and the university had rooms full of computers now, and you could just do on these little desktop things.  But there’s an upfront cost in maintaining those systems, and that’s the part we’ve been ignoring and not investing in adequately in the Park Service, and we need to change that.

              The National Monitoring Program, Vital Signs Monitoring Program, is doing that.  Steve Fancy and Gary Williams in Fort Collins are making those investments and maintaining the databases of the inventory data and of the monitoring data.  Each of the networks is required to have a data manager and a program coordinator.  So that’s half of the required personnel.  You can hire all the other specialists that you want that you have money for in your network, but the two that are required in every network are data management and the leadership.  Another one of the lessons that we learned from Channel Islands and from the prototype.

  Louter:  You had your Apple 2 computer [unclear]?

  Davis:  Yes, that’s right, a little Apple 2, the Apple 2 that could.

  Louter:  What’s happened since it’s been handed over to the park?  The parks continue to [unclear] the program’s going on like it’s a machine that runs itself, or are there—

  Davis:  Well, it takes leadership to make it go, and Kate Faulkner provides that leadership, and she has a marine lead, Dan Richards, supervises the seabirds and the kelp forest and tide pools and beaches.  So he’s got half of the protocols.  And Tim Coonan does the terrestrial side.  We had someone doing GIS, but she went back to graduate school to get her Ph.D., and the park didn’t have the funding to replace her.  But it’s kind of a three-legged stool with information management, terrestrial expertise, and marine expertise.      One of the things I think that we learned that we’ve passed on to other organizations is kind of the rule of the three.  To have a stable organization, you need at least three people assigned to common tasks.  So the marine program had to have at least three people on it, because if somebody moves on, you’ve still got two people to do the work of three and train the new person that comes in.  But if you only have two people, you can’t do the work of two and train the other person at the same time.  So the system falters if you only have two people engaged in it.  So we had at least three people on the terrestrial side, three on marine, and we at one point with the consultant had several people, two or three people, in the information management piece.

  Louter:  So did the prototype or the model you developed easily transfer to other parks?

  Davis:  Yes, and I started doing workshops.  I don’t know if that’s even in this timeline.

  Louter:  Yes, I think it’s in—I want to say it’s sometime in 19—Vital Signs marketing program model for Alaska.  There’s somewhere in here you, I think, the late eighties, I thought, there was a workshop.  There’s a taskforce in 1986.

  Davis:  Yes, somewhere in the late eighties I began making the rounds of other parks and groups like the Alaska group and the Midwest Region group that met up in Ashland, and started talking about how to do it.  But I started doing workshops for individual parks, scoping workshops to develop the conceptual models and just select the vital signs, and I’ve done maybe thirty of those over the years for forty or so parks.  Sometimes a couple parks would get together and do it.  I doubt that I listed all of them in there, but there are some that were particularly related to changes here at Channel Islands or somehow related to there.  Could find those easy enough.  I have a list of them in the PowerPoint that I use for teaching.  In, I think it was 1993, I began teaching at the Smithsonian [Institution].  They have a six-week resident course in biodiversity monitoring.

  Louter:  They do?

  Davis:  They bring people in with private money from BP, Shell Oil, some other sources.  They bring people in from Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.  They have thirty students in each class, and they spend six weeks in a facility at the National Zoo next to Shenandoah National Park in Front Royal, Virginia.  It’s an old military base, so they actually have barracks and rooms and they have a mess hall.  They cater it, and these people come in and spend the six weeks living there.  I would teach the first day of the six weeks and give them a framework for how you organize this, that four-step process of goals and conceptual model stuff, and give them an example, the case studies from Channel Islands and how we developed the various protocols, how we put it all together, and how we use the information at the back end.

              Then the subsequent days, they would have experts in vegetation come in and teach them how to actually lay the transects out and read them, and read the plots for the trees and how to capture frogs and how to do the bird sightings.  So at the end of six weeks, these people actually had the skills required to design and implement a monitoring program when they went home.

              So I did that for 16 years—I didn’t do it last year.  It’s the first time I’ve missed.  It didn’t meet my schedule.  So about fifteen years.  Now there’s 450 of those folks out, and a lot of them are running park systems all over the world.  That’s why I’m going to Brazil.  The guy I’m going to Brazil to lecture for in this seminar was one of the students in that, and now he’s the director of park planning for Brazil.  So there are ripples from what happens here, where they’re carried not just by me, but are carried by people who have had experiences here and are now working in other places.  I did this same sort of technical transfer in Spain and Taiwan and the Caribbean Islands and Mexico, Canada, and Australia.

  Louter:  In terms of how it works at other parks, I’m assuming the Vital Signs Monitoring Program is the predecessor to the Inventory & Monitoring Program?

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  It’s built off the same model?

  Davis:  Yes.  Remember I said it was one of the questions.  It’s always been called I&M or Inventory & Monitoring Programs, but it’s not very catchy.  It’s too many syllables, and that’s why we went to Vital Signs, to say, “This is the Vital Signs Monitoring Program.”  So as we market the program for the Challenge, for the Congress, for OMB, we’ve been pushing that label, just to try to unify it so people understand it.  But the in-house, in the Park Service description, is usually the I&M program.  Pretty cryptic for ordinary folks.

  Louter:  Any places it hasn’t worked?

  Davis:  Well, we’ve had difficulties in a couple of places.  The Central Alaska group at Denali didn’t really accept that this was going to be a long-term program.  They looked at it as funding opportunity for a couple of years to do some interesting studies in the park.  It’s a huge park, and one of the reasons we wanted to do Denali is to test this idea of scale and how do you do something that’s millions of acres.  It’s different than something that’s 250,000 acres.  So their approach was ill-conceived.  They decided to do one watershed that contained park headquarters, because it was convenient and easy to get to, and they would do a series of small mammal and bird and hydrology studies.  It was never adequate to meet the park needs.  I mean, anybody looking at it would say, “Well, that’s not going to work.  I’ve got all the rest of the park out there, and you’re not dealing with wolves or caribou or the major elements of the system.”

              Their argument was, “Well, that’s already taken care of.  We already have resource management.  We have long-term studies going on that we fund from various sources we kind of piece together to look at those iconic parts of Alaska.  So we need to fill in the gaps with this vital signs monitoring, so we’re going to do the squirrels and dickey birds.”  It just never made any sense, and it was run out of the regional office.  You know Alaska’s different.  So it was run out of the regional office, and never was really successful.

              But from the failure of that program, and it just didn’t produce, and the money was in the park base, but nothing was coming out of it in contrast to the Channel Islands program that was pumping out publications and handbooks and lectures and having the ripple effect through the Smithsonian and other places.  Denali was nothing.  It was a black hole.  Money was going in it and there was no outcome, no outputs, even, out of that program.  So they collapsed that whole program and said, “Okay, that’s not working.”

              But out of that came probably the best monitoring programs developed under the Vital Signs and the Challenge, was the Central Alaska one.  They took the prototype money and added it to the network money, and they’d had those experiences and they knew what not to do, and developed the best documented program in the system.  The guidelines for development for protocols, monitoring protocols, was written by the people in Alaska from that failed program.  New people came in, started over, but out of the ashes rose probably the best models that we have for how you ought to go about developing it in the twenty-first century, what a protocol looks like and how you organize the program.

              The other one that was a partial success was Great Smoky Mountains.  The Southeast Region only allowed them to ask for a half a million dollars.  Again, nobody in the regional offices, I think, really believed that we were going to institute a monitoring program in the Park Service.  They didn’t think it was possible.  So they were pretty cynical about whether or not we could get long-term funding, and so they said, “Well, here’s an opportunity.  If we ask for what we really need, which might be $900,000 for Great Smokies in 1985, we won’t get it because they’ve only got a few million dollars.”  So the regional office gave the park guidance, in addition to what they got from the Washington office, and said, “Just limit your proposal to $500,000,” so it was about half of what the people in the park believed they needed.  So they weren’t very enthusiastic about the program they had proposed, and it was truly less than half of what they needed.  So they started out kind of in the hole, and they never really dug out of it.  So that one was not much of a success.

              There were some personality issues at Mammoth Cave that I would chalk up to just the wrong person in the wrong job asked to do something he didn’t believe in and didn’t want to do, and that was not an unpredictable outcome.  So that was three out of the eleven.  We learned a lot from two of them.  One of them is just a bad deal, and they’re still having problems in that network, probably related to bad attitudes.

  Louter:  That’s at Mammoth Cave?

  Davis:  Yes.

  Louter:  So did a place like the Great Smoky, did they recover and get more funding, or did they get $500,000?

  Davis:  They got some more funding because they’re part of the network now.  So they’re working in that, and they went the route of “Let’s go do this all-taxa inventory.”  There are other ways to get at this issue.  They’re very creative people, very talented people, and already had pretty good capacity to do science like Everglades and Yellowstone.  It’s always at the top of that list.  That’s one of the reasons they had such a good proposal.  They had professionals on staff who knew how to write proposals and chase money and get it.

              So when we got that extra proposal for the eastern deciduous forest, Shenandoah already had the protocols in place.  They were ready to go just like Channel Islands, so that was falling off the log easy to select Shenandoah.  We knew we were going to fund Shenandoah as a prototype, but when Smokies came in with a great proposal, everybody was really excited about it.  Had great ecologists, a great statistician who’d helped them with the experimental design that was very innovative and cost-effective.  So we were very excited to do it, but it was clearly only half of what they needed, and I think that doomed the program to not being as exciting or producing the outcomes that people who are running it wanted.

              But what we did learn from all the ten biomes that we tested is that the approach turned out to be the same in all of them.  It didn’t make any difference whether it was high desert, low desert, Sierra, conifer forests or Pacific Northwest or Alaska or Hawaiian Islands or coral reef in the Virgin Islands or the islands here.  Goals.  And they all settled eventually on the same goals, so that now the national program just has a set of five goals that everybody uses.  They’re worded the same way.

              I used to start the workshops off with, “Well, what do  you expect out of a monitoring program?  What do you want it to be?”  And we’d work for half a day crafting these bullets that would describe what the goals of the program were and find what it was not.  It was not going to establish cause and effect or cause and consequence in an ecosystem.  It was going to provide correlations, but it wasn’t going to tell you this causes that.  That’s research.  You have to do manipulations to draw those kinds of conclusions.

              There’s a lot of other things you have to do.  Just saying what monitoring is not, saying what it is, would take a little while.  Eventually, we have all been to, “You know what, all the parks need the same things.  Let’s just give them the five goals and say, ‘Now, how do you design the program?’”  And they would all end up having to say, “Well, we have to know what the system is, so you need a conceptual model.”  So we ended up in the same four steps every time we did it.  So after a while, you begin to shortcut those things and give them some guidance on how to do that.  So the workshops get shorter or they spend more time working on the definitions or the identification and selection of vital signs, what are the measurements we’re going to make in the system, and what do we already know about the system that allows us to make those decisions, and do we already have monitoring protocols over this period of time?  Over ten or fifteen years, techniques began to evolve and people began to standardize how they did some of those measurements, so it got easier to do the workshops.

              But the approach, the basic way you go about doing things, stayed the same.  There were several attempts for terrestrial people to take a more systematic approach—do you need to answer?

  Louter:  It’s my wife.

  [Walking trail file is inaudible – wind and static on recording]

  [Begin File 8]

  Louter:  It’s Santa Rosa Island, and it’s August 28.  Gary Davis and Dave Louter.

              The one big question I had from driving around Santa Rosa yesterday was—well, one question probably leads to another, but if you’re back here after all these years working in the marine biology program at the Park Service, is there one thing that strikes you as you’re driving around the island and looking at places that you’ve done all this research for years, do you have some kind of image of where the oceans or the marine biology programs have come since you’ve started?  Is there any kind of a sense of “We started here and now we’re there”?  What is the meaning of the oceans to the national parks, idea of national parks?  Because there’s this whole sense of these resources out there, things that people can’t see.  So in the big parks, we manage all this stuff.  The big animals we can see.  But I always wondered has the program, if it is a program, come to a certain point where it’s more recognizable maybe than it was in the past, that people can think of parks in ways they haven’t before?  I’m just curious about that, or anything else you might want to offer.

  Davis:  That’s a good question.  An important part of what the National Park Service does is manage scenery.  How do you perceive scenery in the ocean?  It is one of the biggest challenges that we have.  How far have we come in the last few years?  A long way.  We have even further to go, but the first order of business for the Park Service was recognizing that we had obligations and opportunities for ocean conservation that didn’t just start in the twenty-first century.  The first marine parks were created in 1916, 1921, ’25, ’35, so we’ve been doing it a fairly long time, and we’ve accumulated seventy-five ocean parks in the system, including the Great Lakes parks in the Atlantic and in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean and Pacific.

              But the Park Service really wasn’t cognizant of that.  If you didn’t work in one of those parks, and even if you did work in one of those parks, it was easy for the park managers or the stewards to say, “We don’t know what’s out there.  We don’t have the equipment to do that, and we have more than a full-time job taking care of the land piece that we can see that people appreciate and are concerned about.”  So we basically ignored the ocean parks except in a few places like the Virgin Islands or Biscayne National Park that’s 95 percent underwater and the water is shallow and clear and warm.  So in tropical places, people were able to get it.

              But the fact of the matter is, North America is a temperate place, and tropical things seem really exotic and far away to most Americans, and it’s pretty peripheral.  Even though this is a seafaring nation, we’ve had a huge heritage in the ocean from whaling ships, and that’s easy to trace.  The discoveries of America came all over the ocean and all of our ocean-based commerce is what built the nation, all had to do with the ocean and transportation along the coast.  A lot of our ocean parks are tied up in those kinds of places and those types of activities.

              So the first order of business was getting people to recognize that that was there, and the National Park System Advisory Board issued a report in 2001 entitled “Rethinking the National Parks for the Twenty-First Century,” and in that they observed that while we were barely holding our own, taking care of natural and cultural resources on the land, and we were losing important things, it was even worse in the ocean.  We were really losing America’s heritage that had been captured in the national parks, and we needed to do something about it.  That was a galvanizing report.  It gave associate director Mike Soukup and a few colleagues an opportunity to say to the NLC and the Department of the Interior, “Let’s do something about it.”

              That’s when they invited me to come look into it, see what we could do about it, develop a strategy and try to mobilize the Park Service to deal with ocean park issues.  So that’s what started me on the WASO detail, and I think that we have done a great deal to improve awareness of ocean park issues and to prod NPS into addressing those issues.  The National Park Service leadership is now very aware of oceans, and they include oceans when they talk about the activities that we need to do in the Centennial Challenge.  We talk about coastal resources a lot more.

              The hurricanes of the early 2000s, five hurricanes crossed paths in 2003 or 2004 over Dry Tortugas National Park.  It was hurricane central for the western Atlantic.  Of course, Katrina, we lost the road out to the islands in Gulf Islands National Seashore, several times in the last decade, and making the decisions about whether to rebuild that, how to rebuild it, or replace it with ferries, that discussion is still going on.  People became much more aware of ocean resources between 2001 and 2007.

              The challenge now is to convey that knowledge and awareness to the American public and maintain the enthusiasm and the momentum that has been developed within the Park Service and make sure that that knowledge gets down into the rank and file, into our partnerships, in all the other people that are engaged and let them know that we’re interested and we want to do that.  We have formed partnerships with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s primary ocean agency.  We have formed partnerships with the Minerals Management Service, the Department of Interior Ocean Agency, with the Fish and Wildlife Service.  Their refuge system includes 166 ocean parks or ocean refuges with coral reefs.

              So we’ve kind of laid the foundation and begun to build the infrastructure for dealing with ocean conservation in the National Park Service in the last few years.  The places that I know the best are the Virgin Islands, the Dry Tortugas, the Florida Keys and Florida Bay and Everglades, and, of course, Channel Islands, which is where you started the question.

  Louter:  Yes.

  Davis:  It’s a big loop around what has been going on and kind of where we are at this point.  In the last five years, we have also seen the creation of some areas protected from fishing in four parks, in Virgin Islands National Park.  The Secretary of Interior could not change the law that created the park.  He could create a national monument with the President’s authority under the Antiquities Act, and so adjacent to Virgin Islands National Park, a new Virgin Islands Coral Reef National Monument was created that protects the coral reef resources from fishing effects.

              Buck Island Reef National Monument was expanded from 880 acres to 13,000 acres, all protected from the effects of fishing.  In Channel Islands National Park, the State of California, in partnership with the National Marine Sanctuaries Program and the National Park Service, created a network of ten areas protected from the effects of fishing to begin the restoration of the integrity and stability and beauty and capacity for renewal of kelp forest and sea grass communities and submarine canyons around the Channel Islands.

              Finally, the National Park Service, working again with the National Marine Sanctuaries Program and the State of Florida, created a research natural area that covers about half of Dry Tortugas National Park and began the restoration of the coral reef system there by protecting that area from fishing.

              So now in U.S. waters, we have four groups of marine reserves, these places that are free of fishing effects, to begin studying what the effects of fishing have been on tropical and temperate systems.

              Commercial fishing was eliminated, as it should have been in 1925, but it was finally eliminated from Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve after decades and decades of squabbling and arguing, and there was very little fishing activity in the early part of the twentieth century, but it grew and grew.  It’s finally having quite an impact on the place, and that it was supposed to have been prohibited in the beginning.  Finally, after a series of court cases and settlements had eliminated commercial fishing, there is very little recreational fishing from Glacier Bay.  So it is virtually a place that is free of the effects of fishing right now.

  Louter:  Does Glacier Bay still have Native Alaskans who come in to harvest some marine resources, or was it otters or sea otters?

  Davis:  There’s not very much at Glacier Bay.  There are in many parks and subsistence fishing still goes on, but all fishing was eliminated from the wilderness waters of Glacier Bay, so around the Beardslee Islands, in that group, there is an area free of fishing.  So Glacier Bay is really the fifth wheel, the fifth part, or park that can be studied to look at the effects of fishing and kind of a gradation from fishing to no fishing, to sport fishing, to commercial fishing in the adjacent waters.

              So we have several opportunities, and one of the things that we have been working on the last couple of years is engaging NOAA and the U.S. Geological Survey, the research arms of the National Park Service and our partners, to invest some of their research funds in these investigations.  We have begun those in the southeastern U.S. in the tropical waters down there.  To a lesser extent, we’re still working on getting the Channel Islands and the Glacier Bay studies underway.  We have doubled the number of monitoring sites at Channel Islands National Park in the last two years to better resolve the changes that come from creating these fishing-free areas.

              It’s too soon to tell exactly what the effects of stopping fishing in these small areas will have on the system.  We fished in them for over a hundred years.  We’ve stopped fishing now for three or four, five years.  We have animals that live in those areas that were being taken by fishing that have life spans of thirty, forty, fifty, seventy, a hundred, a hundred and fifty years, so really long-lived species, and for them to be reestablished and to grow and begin to reproduce in the large numbers that they once produced and see the ecological effects of that cascade through the system is going to take a while.  We need some patience to look at that.  But there are a lot of things that we can learn along the way and encourage people to further explore zoning in the ocean as a conservation tool.

              The classic mistake that was made by the fisheries science community was that we thought we could disarticulate ecosystems and manage species or groups of species as though they were independent of the environment and the other species that they competed with for light and space and food and in predator-prey relationships.  We thought we could take that all apart and just manage on the biology of the species, based on its age and size and maturity and its growth rates and fecundity, and if we knew all those things, we could engineer those species and their populations to enhance productivity and make it sustainable with harvest.

              What we’ve learned in the last fifty or sixty years is the power of the biological interactions to control, shape, drive ecosystems and those populations that are contained in them, that they are not independent of one another, that when you remove all the big predators, there are huge cascading effects of increases in grazing animals and their effects on the structure, the functioning of the whole community and its capacity to replace itself.  So we’re learning that lesson, but ever so slowly.  It is so difficult to make a change in something so deeply ingrained both in the fishery science and the fishing industries, that it’s been a huge challenge for the society as a whole.

              The parks provide us with a small example of a way to learn and explore a new way of maintaining the integrity and the productivity of an ecosystem and still allowing some harvest somewhere.  It may not be in the core areas where you have high densities of large reproductively active animals.  It may be in the adjacent waters.  But we just don’t know how large those core areas need to be, how to shape them and place them along the coast.  So these four or five experiments in the National Park System are really the nation’s first efforts in learning a new way of sustaining ocean fisheries.  So that part of it is very exciting, as you can imagine.

              When they finally lay the foundation, what is it we’re going to be able to build, what will work the best, and we’re looking for ways to optimize that, not only in the biology, the ecology, and oceanography, but also in the social and economic realms.  What are the best ways to create these protected areas so the communities will support them?  If the communities don’t support them, you can’t hire enough rangers to protect them all, or enough game wardens to protect them.  The communities that benefit need to understand their relationship with these places.  So we’re back to, how to make this work.

  [pause]

  Louter:  It seems hard enough in the terrestrial systems of parks to convince the public of the changes that need to take place.  It must be harder or a bigger challenge to have them understand the marine resources.  I mean, if you think of your typical park visitor, let’s just create one.  The typical park visitor is the auto tourist who drives into Yosemite Valley in the middle of summer and has an experience.  How do you convey the meaning of parks and bring resources to that person if that is, in fact, the typical visitor?  Or maybe the visitor that appreciates marine resources, like a rock climber.  There’s a different, discrete group that comes to parks from different experiences.  That’s the thing I’m interested in.  What do we do with that?  Because it certainly seems like global warming and all these other big topics not only raise ocean levels, but raise awareness of oceans in general.  But I’m just curious.

  Davis:  I think it’s very parallel to this situation we have with park visitors.  And you’re right, the average people drive into the valley in the summertime and look around and have an interesting, wonderful experience.  Some of them even have epiphanies and become more involved and get more engaged in different ways.  And the same thing is true of the ocean.  It’s just there are many fewer of them, and it is a challenge for the Park Service to provide that mass experience.

              You’re right, there are the technical rock climbers.  In the ocean, probably the scuba divers.  They’re the people who have learned that special skill, that can actually explore nature more on its own terms.  But we have opportunities for people to appreciate the ocean, the coastal resources, just riding along the coast.  Whale watching is probably one of those.  That’s the Yosemite Valley experience, is seeing a blue whale, the largest animal that ever graced the earth, is still alive and well and shows up in large numbers.  We have maybe two hundred of them in Channel Islands National Park most summers that are hanging around, and once you see one of those, you never forget it.  The humpback whales that are acrobatic and jump out of the water and do the whole bubble screen feeding and lunging, wonderful behaviors there, and that connects to people.  People are really excited, and we can build on some of those relationships.

              But the fundamental issue, I think, is very similar to the issue that park managers had in the late nineteenth century of selling the concept of protecting wilderness and nature and wild places to an urban eastern population from New York to Washington, D.C.  That’s where the American people were when the parks were first conceived.  They were all in the West, and people had no more access to those than most people today have of submarine canyons, coral reefs, kelp forests, and sea grass meadows.  So I think that we can look to what was done successfully in the nineteenth century, with our twenty-first century technology and use art and science, use the scientific community as explorers, as the John Wesley Powells went down the river and wrote about it and told people about it.  We have explorers who do that today.  Oceanographers like Bob Ballard and Sylvia Earle.  Jacques Cousteau is certainly an early pioneer in that area.

              And they also used art to connect urban people to parks and wilderness in the 19thy Century, the Thomas Morans and other people out of the Hudson Valley School went west and produced those immense murals that they brought back and hung in the halls of Congress and in the White House and in the art museums, the National Art Gallery, and people saw those and were inspired.  I think our version of that today is 3D IMAX films.  We need to better engage artists who are storytellers, using moving colorful images and showing people the wonders of nature, the incredible ways of sustaining life and the intricacies and complexities of interactions of plants and animals that live in these incredible places that are as foreign, as exotic, as exciting as outer space or as the New World was to the people in Europe in the fifteenth century.

              So if we use those tools, I think that we can make those connections, but those are the challenges to us.  Channel Islands National Park has taken a tool that we developed in the kelp forest monitoring program at Channel Islands in the early 1980s and turned it into a program they call Channel Islands Live, so that two or three times a week there’s a park ranger and several park volunteers that go down in the kelp forest in Anacapa with a video camera and they transmit that image not only to the island and people standing on the island can see what they see and talk to them and interview them and ask them questions, and the rangers can point out the sea life, but that image is now being microwaved back to the mainland and goes into the school system in Ventura County and on to the Internet so that people all over the world can see that.

              It’s using that kind of technology, that, “Gee whiz, look what I can do with the toys that I have available right now,” but learning how to connect people to the place, through those images, through those opportunities to interact with a diver on the bottom of the ocean, that’s really cool, and once you get past the really cool part, I think there’s some important messages that we can deliver, we’re beginning to learn how to craft, that will help people appreciate that they can actually make a difference in a place like this and that it’s important to them.  That’s really our mission, is to just connect people to the ocean so that they care about it, they know about it, they care about it, and then the other parts will come.  So our focus right now is just on making those connections.

  Louter:  Great.  My other question I was thinking of yesterday as we were driving around, it’s the old, if you could make a recommendation or a statement, it’s not if you were king for a day, but if, you know, the President asked you, “Hey, what would you do to change or improve science in the National Park System or marine science, what would you do?”  This isn’t like go insult anybody you ever wanted to insult, but I’m thinking of you’ve been in the business or in the area for a long time.  If you could sort of summarize what’s happened, the good things and the bad things, not that we’re looking for skeletons in closets, but, I mean, I think about that.  While watching you sit out looking over some of those great vistas yesterday, I was thinking, you know, these are those big moments where you wonder, okay, I’ve been at this a long time, and here are things we’ve done.

              We all know the story and Dick [Sellars] tells in his book about the trajectory of science, but there’s probably other stories about what’s happened within the agency and its commitment to science or where things have been and where they might be going.  It’s just hard for me to put my finger on it, but, I mean, if there is something that you would suddenly walk up and say, “What would you do?”  If you could wave your magic wand or if you could tell me candidly what’s been going on, is there anything you’d say?

  Davis:  I think that the nation, the National Park Service, are poised to take advantage of some of the investments that we’ve made in the past.  We’ve heard the lessons for forty or more years now about the important role that science could play, the power of science.  We have now some concrete examples where we’ve made small investments at Yellowstone and Everglades and Great Smoky Mountains and in the Natural Resource Challenge.  We actually have an awful lot of the capacity or the foundation for the capacity for scientific-based stewardship in place, and I think really the key now is to continue in that direction to make whole the operational capacity of the Park Service and to continue with the growth and the use of science.  I think that we’re headed in the right direction, and we’re moving slowly and cautiously.

              I guess if I had one thing to say, it’s that we don’t need to be that cautious anymore.  We could move forward much more boldly, much more quickly.  I think that the President’s actions, actually, in creating a Northwest Hawaiian Islands National Monument is a move in the right direction.  We need to do more of that.  We need to actually protect the resources in national marine sanctuaries, wildlife refuges, and ocean parks.  They are largely paper protected areas right now that allow unsustainable uses to continue because they’re out of sight and out of mind, and that’s the thing that needs to be cared for.  It’s a very small part of the nation’s ocean.

              The economic zone that the United States claims, along with other nations of the world, but the economic zone that we claim in the ocean is an area larger than the landmass of the United States, including Alaska, so it doubles the size of the nation, and we’re largely ignoring it.  We have not set up a National Park System or national forest system in the ocean, except just in a little band right along the shoreline, and we’re only scratching at the surface of the ocean and its capacity for providing benefits to the people of the United States.

              So my magic wand would say let’s take care of the pieces that we have that are already designated as so-called protected areas and let’s actually protect them and let’s explore what’s possible, just as we did on land in the American West and in the wilderness of Alaska.  Let’s do that in the ocean.  Let’s do it now, soon rather than later, larger areas, more areas, networks, so that you can see that there’s some connectivity among them.  We’ve learned some of these lessons on land, but the protected areas we have are so fragmented that they may not be able to survive something like global change.  We may not be able to sustain the biodiversity integrity of the biosphere that supports people on land because we’ve broken it into so many small pieces.  If we could avoid that in the ocean, I think that we’d all be better off for it.  So those are the big picture things that I would recommend.

  Louter:  So fragmentation of ecosystems in the ocean and how some of the fragmentations of the ecosystems on land [unclear].

  Davis:  From our rudimentary knowledge of ocean systems, it looks like their ecosystems are larger already, so you need larger protected areas to maintain their integrity.  Maybe when we learn more about the oceans in the next hundred years, we’ll find out that they have just the same complexity as systems on land, and then we made big mistakes.  But I’d rather make them on the side of, “Oh, we protected too much,” than “We could do with less.”

  Louter:  What would a system of parks or forest, an analogous system look like?  Would it be a series of small little reserve areas within the vast ocean, or would it be a continuous system of parks or marine reserves that are all somehow connected like big jigsaw puzzle pieces, some kind of pattern?

  Davis:  I think that’s one of the things that we need to discover.  We really don’t know what that would look like.  But what we know is that they would be much larger than the protected areas we have now.

              In the 1950s, the marine protected areas where they were fully protected in the National Park System, and there were a few, were on the order of a few acres, ten or fifteen each.  That is not large enough to protect much of anything.  In the 1980s and nineties, then we began to explore thousands of acres of protected areas.  Protected areas, each one as a minimum viable size, and I think that that’s probably small.  I think something on the order of thirty or forty thousand acres is probably the minimum size of an area that would adequately protect a sustainable marine ecosystem, and that’s a minimum.  Optimum is probably ten times that size.  So probably looking at a completely protected area on the order of half a million acres in the ocean is probably where you would want to go.  So you would need networks in a variety of different settings across gradients where things are connected.

              You know Puget Sound well, so coming down the rivers into the estuaries and into the inland waters and then through the passes and out into the open ocean, so something that gave you pieces, half a million-acre chunks, that went down river systems.  It probably doesn’t make sense to try and divide a river in half.  So you would do one river system out of five.  But you would connect all the pieces so that system had a chance of surviving the other developments and alterations of the environment that people make.  So that’s the kind of thing.

              On open ocean systems, people are beginning to explore that and how long it would take, but the things that we know best are those shallow areas, so sea mounts are clear systems that are connected to the pelagic systems.  So let’s take some sea mounts and protect them adequately.

              People are raising awareness of the effects of trawling on the ocean bottom and deep sea areas.  We’ve discovered coral systems on the deep sea in cold water.  Corals don’t have to have warm water.  That’s only been discovered in the last ten, fifteen years.  Trawlers were knocking them flat and not even aware of it.  They’re not dragging cotton nets on the bottom; they’re dragging chunks of steel that go out in front of these things with chains with links this big that are a mile long behind the boat.  It’s huge industrial equipment, and it’s having impacts on the ocean floor.  Most countries are recognizing that and banning it in certain areas and changing those destructive practices.  So we’re making some headway, but I think the challenge is getting it to the most people in time to make a difference.

  Louter:  Breakfast?

  Davis:  Yes.

  [Begin File 9]

  Davis:  The steam surveys here on Santa Rosa Island were designed to characterize where there was water and what it looked like in these little segments, and they would actually survey with the primitive instruments, the sextant and the tape, and they would measure the lengths of things and the elevations, so they would get an idea of the slope of the streambed.  So it was kind of a physical survey of the place, and then they had categories for characterizing the condition of vegetation, whether it was emergent or whether it was just trampled down, what was the condition of the banks, were they collapsed, were they deeply incised, were they just gradual slopes.  So there was all the physical description of the place, and they would photograph each of those segments.

              Then they did some biological collecting to see what kinds of critters they could find, invertebrates, beetles, and fly larvae and those kinds of things, frogs, pollywogs, the larvae is what they found.  They had dip nets and ways of looking for if there were any fish, but it was mostly just a physical—

  Louter:  Okay, let me just check—

  [Begin File 10]

  Davis:  There’s a transect, so it would measure elevation and direction.  Yes, that was pre-GIS, certainly.  So they surveyed that and then did the biological collections, characterized, identified the vegetation that was growing some distance, meters, from the waterline, and if there were any dry spots where the stream went underground, and there were a few.  So that’s basically what the surveys were.

  Louter:  This was the first one in all of Channel Islands or first one on—

  Davis:  Yes, first one on the Channel Islands.

  Louter:  So, was it a model?  Was it set up that all the other ones kind of followed this one, or is it—

  Davis:  Well, it was an extension of what the Forest Service was doing elsewhere in California and in the West, and then when we ended up in court, part of the settlement agreement required that the Park Service monitor water quality.

  Louter:  And the court hearings was because of the ranching?

  Davis:  Yes, because of the impact that the ranching operation was having on these riparian areas and on water quality.  So water quality turned out to be the key element that was in violation of state law.

  Louter:  Because [unclear] the conversation yesterday, we were talking about how we owned the land, leased it back, and then didn’t do the compliance that the state wanted for water quality.

  Davis:  Right.

  Louter:  That was because the cattle were down in the riparian zone?

  [note: at this point forward, wind is distorting the quality of the recording, so some of the conversation is inaudible]

  Davis:  Yes.  They were walking.  I mean, there were cattle walking all through there, like crazy, and they were literally trampling the streams.  This was the first survey.  Then when we saw the value of that and said, well, we need to characterize the rest of the streams, they came back and worked with—by then Kate was here, so that must have been 1993-4— she brought that USFS team back and they did seven or eight of the streams here on the north shore, characterized them for a couple of years.  So that first one was ’86 or so.  They came back in ’87, ’89.

  Louter:  We’ve got photo documentation [unclear] images scanned?

  Davis:  They have.  Kate has done a couple of technical reports and posters and given presentations on the restoration here, because then the management action in ’98 gave us the “after,” when cattle were removed.  So we had about ten years to build the case then.  Cattle were having this impact.  The water-quality regulations required an action.  The Park Service failed to take it.  NPCA sued, and NPS was forced to then begin to get the place into compliance and begin what were the results, how did we clean things up.  Now we’re, as I understand it, largely in compliance.  So getting the cattle out of the creek pretty much did the job.

  Louter:  The NPCA sued on behalf of [unclear]?

  Davis:  No, they sued the Park Service.  They sued the Park Service.

  Louter:  Sometimes they sue because the Park Service wants them to.  [laughs]

  Davis:  Well, they could, but I don’t think that was the case.

  Louter:  Not the case there?

  Davis:  No, not necessarily.  Court cases are interesting things.  Sometimes you want to lose.  It’s just that the situation is such that you can’t take the action you think needs to be done, but policy or law don’t allow it, and it needs to be decided in the larger case where you have laws that conflict with one another.  That’s how we resolve some of those differences in a democracy.

  Louter:  As far as the I&M program was concerned, did the monitoring that took place here have any lasting effect on how the program developed in the park and then through the Park Service, or was it simply just another chapter in what was going on?  It was isolated.  Because I was under the assumption that what happened on Channel Islands ultimately affected the growth of the I&M program through the system.

  Davis:  Yes, I think that it did.  I think that’s an accurate statement that what happened at Channel Islands and the development of the monitoring program here has influenced the service-wide inventory and monitoring program.  I think it’s a cumulative effect.  There were a lot of things that have happened in the marine environment.  There are lots of examples of how fisheries were closed here, the cattle ranching operation was changed, altered.  The owners of the ranching operations decided that economically they couldn’t continue as a result of being in compliance with the water-quality standards that the state set.  So there were a number of major management decisions based on the science that was produced by the monitoring program here, and people began to recognize that having the information generated by monitoring allowed you to do a better job of stewardship.  It was faster and cheaper, more reliable.  There were a lot of people who wanted better information about parks and just didn’t know how to go about doing it.  There was, I think, a belief that it was just too expensive, it cost too much to do the monitoring, so we’ll just have to do it study by study, short-term event driven by necessity, rather than being proactive and thinking strategically down the road about what it’s going to take to sustain the parks in the long term.

              Channel Islands provided a case study of what it really costs, and it wasn’t that expensive, and how effective the results could be for major events.  We weren’t making minor decisions about whether or not to mow the sides of the road, you know.  These were major issues that dealt with the integrity and stability of the ecosystems, and that they were threatened that they were going under, that we were losing species.  The foxes are a prime example of that.  The white abalone, great example of things that were about to disappear.  If we did not have monitoring programs in place here, we wouldn’t even have known it.  They would have been gone before we discovered there was a problem.  So the monitoring program provided an early warning and gave us time, enough lead time, to make some decisions about how we could fix it and change the policies and in some cases change the law.

              The brown pelican colony on Anacapa Island was a classic example that led us to believe that monitoring was a good investment, and there DDT was preventing reproduction.  The adult birds lived for twenty-five or thirty years.  If you waited for the adult population to decline and pelicans to disappear and then say, “Oh, I wonder what happened?” it’s too late to do anything about it.  But because you recognize there are no chicks being produced, you begin the investigation and find out that it was DDT that caused that, and it takes years—and it took a decade—but we finally banned DDT and got it out of the system in time for those birds to recover.  We find out through subsequent investigations it wasn’t just pelicans; it was bald eagles, peregrine falcons, and the fishes that they were eating were all influenced by the DDT in very negative ways.

              So these were big issues, big questions, and the Park Service was able to do a better, faster, cheaper job because they had the information.  So that led to supporting people all across the country who had wanted to do that kind of thing.  The superintendent at Shenandoah National Park had independently created a monitoring program there.  Mike Finley who had come from Everglades to Yosemite, used to describe, he said he’d go into public meetings over various policy issues about fire or visitation or water management, and he said that at Yosemite he felt naked going into the meetings because he had come from Everglades where he had staff of fifty scientists that were providing him information when he went in to do battle with the Water Management District and the Corps of Engineers.  He didn’t have that information when he came to Yosemite.  So he could see the value of having the scientists on staff and investing in long-term data sets and understanding of the ecosystem that you have in South Florida.

              So people like that all over the country, Yellowstone, the Great Smokies, are the other classic examples of places where the Park Service had invested in science.  So the ground was already prepared, I think.  There was a need identified, but people were fearful of the expense.  Channel Islands, I think one of the things it did was kind of break the ice on that and say, well, it’s affordable if we do this kind of vital signs approach, where we don’t measure everything everywhere all the time, but we select a few things that we can reliably measure that give us an early warning, that describe the natural dynamics of the system and tell us when we’re out of sync, that help us identify the results of the management actions, the results of the policies about whether or not the condition of resources is getting better or worse.  It allows us to make more effective decisions.

              As they say in the manufacturing trade, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.  What we were trying to manage was all of these natural resources and we had no way of measuring them.  The Vital Signs Program just gives us a way to measure things so we can more effectively manage them.

  Louter:  So was it the Natural Resource Challenge then that brought the organization of the inventory and monitoring program?

  Davis:  The Natural Resource Challenge brought the program to its first level of completion.  These things are done kind of a stepwise fashion.  You do it, you try it for awhile, you learn from that experience, and then you build the next level of it.  There was an intermediate step that the national office chief scientist, who was Dick Briceland, and he was an engineer who had come to the Park Service from EPA, and he described the Park Service as “distributed anarchy.”  He was used to a central control of an organization, and he was appalled at the organization of the Park Service, and especially the science program.  He came from a place where they did a lot of monitoring of water quality, air quality, mostly physical, chemical kinds of things, and they were just getting started with biology.  So he understood kind of the basic principles and what it was about, and he dedicated service-wide $600,000 a year to figuring out what we should do about monitoring.

              With that, we created a central committee, a steering committee from the regions and from the parks and talked about our experiences in places like Channel Islands and Everglades and Yellowstone and Smokies and Shenandoah, said what could we learn from that, how could we develop a service-wide monitoring program and make estimates of the cost.  Based on our experiences, that first little group got together and we estimated that it would cost about 200 million dollars a year to adequately monitor the natural resources of the National Park System.  That was 20 percent of the operating budget of the agency at the time.  People were not even willing to ask for that much money.  You couldn’t even get money to say, “Well, let’s prepare a proposal that shows why we need that much money and how it will be spent.”  I mean, they just weren’t even willing to entertain a proposal for that much money.

              So we had to step back from that and say, so how do we get to the point where we can get leadership of the Park Service, the public, NPCA, all of the people who were involved to the point of understanding this is what we need, why we need it?  So we need some demonstration projects.  We need some pilot projects to show how this Vital Signs approach can work, and it works in Mediterranean ecosystems, works in desert systems, in mountain systems, in eastern woodlands, down in the Everglades and up in Alaska.  It works in all kinds of biomes.  So let’s do a prototype program with ten programs that we can demonstrate that the approach in all these different biomes will be fundamentally the same.  Let’s test that hypothesis, so let’s try it.  So let’s do ten one-million-dollar programs, and we’ll develop those over a ten-year period.  Let’s look at what we can learn from our history and from the places where people, not just in parks but in any ecosystem we can find, have had long-term data sets that have been used to guide conservation, to guide stewardship of natural resources.

              So we asked the people of the Park Service to give us examples, to nominate data sets or situations where long-term data sets had been used, that they weren’t monitoring, necessarily, maybe it was just sequential research, and what were the issues that they addressed.  We got about 125 nominations, and we had a workshop in Ventura and selected a dozen or fifteen of those and said, let’s do case studies of those situations, and we’ll publish that in a book so that we can say here’s our experience to show that monitoring is better, faster, and cheaper than the other approaches that we were taking.  And we did that.  That became the ’96 book, [unclear].

              That was part of the three-pronged strategy for developing confidence in monitoring [unclear] investment in conservation.  So ten prototype programs, examples from the past that showed how it was a better investment, and the third piece was, let’s do the inventories.  Let’s gather together the information that already exists about the resource in the National Park System.  One of the first parts of that was done in the western region was RMAP, Resource Management Assessment Program--it started with the acronym and then made up the name.  They knew they had to have “map” in it, because that was about the time of the origins of GIS geographic information systems mapping.  Jan van Wagtendonk, the research scientist at Yosemite, was on that committee, and he said, “Oh, yeah, we’ve got to have ‘map’ in it and ‘resources,” so it’s RMAP, and then figured out the new acronym.

              RMAP was an inventory.  It was a structured inventory of how many miles of stream, how many acres of lakes, how many acres of forest, how many miles of trail.  It was just a physical description of the park.  I think there were eighty-seven fields in that database that were required to be completed.  But that was kind of the foundation of physical description and inventories of soils and water quality and vascular plants and vertebrate animals.  So we have twelve basic inventories that we identified.  So, just doing that, gathering what together we already know, showing where there are gaps and filling those gaps is the third part of the strategy.

              The budget strategy was to try to add a million dollars to the Park Service operating budget for inventory and monitoring of natural resources over a ten-year period, and we’d spend some of the money in the beginning for the inventories, and then as the inventories were completed, we would roll that money into monitoring programs.  So at the end of a decade, we would have ten prototype programs in place and running, that we could use as keystones and as demonstration cases.  People could see how it worked.

              We started with four parks, with Channel Islands, Shenandoah, Denali, and I think Great Smoky Mountains was in that first round.  We requested proposals from parks all over the system for what they would do for monitoring, what they needed to be one of these prototype programs that we could learn from.  We wanted to test the idea of clusters of parks, of groups of parks, or networks of parks, working together collaboratively, because large parks can support a big scientific staff with lots of disciplines to do physical science and botany and zoology, but small parks are never going to be able to support that kind of scientific staff.  So how do we achieve that critical mass of science in order to meet their needs?  We said, well, we could group a bunch of parks together.  So on the Great Plains there were twenty-two parks that could work together that all had similar resources.  In the Southeast, we had the coral reef parks in the Virgin Islands and South Florida where a network organization structure would give us the capacity to do this kind of monitoring.

  [Begin File 11]

  Davis:  —approach to developing confidence in the Park Service that monitoring was a good investment.  It was an essential part of our stewardship, and it was to develop some prototypes in those ten different places, test that concept of networks of parks, to review what we had learned from the past and capture that in a book.

              The third piece was to collect together what information already existed.  It was kind of like saying, well, here’s the menu of things that we need to be monitoring.  Here’s what we know exists in the park, or in the parks, and demonstrate that we could do this kind of work.  So it was really also a prototype in a way to do that.

              The finances of the Park Service through the 1990s allowed us to get about four or five million dollars down the road on that, but nowhere near the ten that we had wanted to do.  But we did get a number of the prototype programs identified.  We got the proposals written for all ten of them.  We got them in line and we were pitching them every year in the budget process, and this is what we wanted to do.  It was, in part, the lack of success of being able to do that, that generated the Natural Resource Challenge.

  Louter:  So that was the 1980s or the early—

  Davis:  It was early nineties, yes.

  Louter:  It was early nineties when you were doing all the ten-million-dollar—

  Davis:  Yes, getting ready with that, and it was trying to pitch that over the years.  Briceland moved on and Gene Hester came in, in his place, and kept it alive and tried to keep it moving.  Both guys came out here and spent some time at Channel Islands to see what we were doing.  Then Mike Soukup came in, and Abby Miller took the monitoring program on as a challenge when she was Gene Hester’s deputy, and Abby really provided the continuity and the energy to keep the monitoring program in the forefront and keep pitching it in the budget process and trying to move it forward.

              When Mike came to town, he instantly saw what it was.  He came from Everglades.  He came from the place where we’d been using that kind of information for a very long time.  I think we talked before about my introductions to long-term data sets, Bill Robertson at Everglades, and Mike had been the recipient of that, the beneficiary of those long-term data sets, and he certainly got it.  So the two of them (Mike and Abby) were a very powerful team, and they brought that to the National Leadership Council and began to pitch that as something that needed to be done.

              The NLC spent a couple of days at one of their meetings trying to figure out how they could change the culture of the National Park Service to accept science as a guiding principle, and they formed a committee.  They said, “Well, we don’t know how to do it, but we have smart people who work for us who can,” and so they punted and created a short-lived committee of people who met in Washington and crafted a strategy.  But there was not consensus yet among that group that change was required or necessary, and what we hadn’t figured out was that you don’t just sit down and say, “Well, if we do these five things, we’ll change the culture of an organization.”  What you had to do was change a perception of a mission.  You had to give people different tasks to do, and in the process, you would begin to change their perspective, and you would bring new people in to address those tasks, and a change in culture would be a byproduct of changing that direction.  We didn’t recognize that at the time when we were struggling with how do we change the culture.

              It was an interesting time.  I served as the western region, Pacific West Region’s representative on that group.  One of the first things we got from one of the regions was, “Well, what’s broken?  There’s nothing to fix.”

              And we went, “Oh, boy.  We have a ways to go with this.”  And that kind of went down in flames.  But it was the birth.  It was the ashes from which the phoenix rose, that became the Natural Resource Challenge, and there was a recognition that there were a whole bunch of things that needed to be done, so we’ll set aside this culture thing and let’s get about the business of doing these things that we need to have done.  That’s when we came up with the Council of Superintendents and a task force that addressed the twelve issues that are in the Natural Resource Challenge and said, “Okay, here’s what we need to do.  These are the most important things.  Let’s get busy on that.”

              Inventory was one of those.  Monitoring was one of those.  Part of air-quality issues had to do with monitoring.  Part of the Water Resources Division work that was in the Challenge had to do with monitoring.  So there were really four elements that came together to form what is today the Vital Signs Monitoring Program, supported by the inventories that all grew out of that earlier strategy of inventories and prototype programs.

              Just last year, this year, ’07, we finally got the money to finish off the last of the networks of parks.  So out of this last group that became the Natural Resource Challenge and that effort, we came up with the idea at a workshop in the Santa Monica Mountains, the idea of clustering together the parks.  We’d had enough experience from those two prototypes in the Great Plains and in the Southeast in the coral reef parks, that clusters could work.  They didn’t always work.  They weren’t a panacea, but that kind of sharing of expertise could work.  So we identified thirty-two networks of parks that could work together in shared biomes.

              The number thirty-two was an arbitrary number that I made up and proposed to the group.  It sounded like about the right size thing.  It would have six to eight parks in it.  We had 270 parks that needed to be served that had significant natural resources in them.  So I was looking at the size of the network that would probably be functional.  It ended up that the networks are composed of three to twenty-two parks, I think.  I just said, you know, thirty or thirty-five, too round.  It sounds more like you really organically developed this thing.  So let’s try thirty-two and see what happens, and it turned out to be a pretty good number.  It worked out for us.  It turns out that Don Neubacher was chairing the group of Research Learning Centers, and independently, he, using the same process, actually, came up with the same number, so he decided we needed thirty-two Research Learning Centers.

              Well, when we all came out together and said, “Well, here’s what we propose,” and he said, “Here’s what we propose,” I said, “Oh, this is a match made in heaven,” because the Research Learning Centers are really the outlets that are test cases for outlets of how we can attract the scholarly and scientific communities in the parks to see them as places where they can learn, where people can recognize the value of parks as places to learn, in addition to all the other wonderful things about inspiration, recreation, having a good time.  They’re places where we learn about nature, they’re places where we learn about our cultural heritage, and we wanted to have formal programs that recognize that value and promoted it.

              The monitoring programs needed an outlet for the information they’re developing.  In addition to informing park managers, we wanted to attract the scientific community.  “Come do research in these places, because we’ll provide you with the framework of understanding of the dynamics of these systems.  If you come here, you get all this background information that’s available to you.  You can add on to that.  You can step forward.  You can stand on our shoulders and see further over the horizon.”

              So we wanted to do that, and we needed to do something beyond.  We focused on doing the monitoring day to day to day to day.  They haven’t got time to do that outreach [unclear] professionals.  It’s a different skill set to do that kind of education, storytelling, and outreach.  So the Research Learning Centers were a perfect match for us.

              The history of the Natural Resource Challenge is still being written.  We recognize that we got what we could out of that, and it’s time to move on from there.  Now we’re looking at what’s the next run, and it looks like the Centennial Challenge.  That will be our next goal.

  [End of interview]

  Transcript edited by Gary Davis, May 2011