Inventory Of Amphibian And Reptile Species At Gettysburg National Military Park And Eisenhower National Historic Site

The authors conducted an inventory of amphibians and reptiles at Gettysburg National Military Park (GETT) and Eisenhower National Historic Site (EISE) from March-November 1999 and 2000. Both parks are located in Adams County, south-central Pennsylvania. Forest, grassland, wetland, and riparian areas were sampled for presence, relative abundance, and distribution of amphibians and reptiles. They used visual-encounter surveys, coverboards, general searches, funnel traps, drift-fence arrays, pitfall buckets, turtle traps, and leaf litter bags in our inventory.

The authors conducted a long-term project (1992-1996) designed to provide a comprehensive review of vertebrates (amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals) in four national parks in the eastern United States. They field tested select protocols at Gettysburg National Military Park, Eisenhower National Historic Site, Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site, and Valley Forge National Historical Park to (1) determine the effectiveness of protocols for inventorying and monitoring terrestrial vertebrates in terms of time, labor, cost and types of data obtained and (2) predict and document the number of terrestrial vertebrate species within the parks. This focus of this report is amphibians and reptiles.

Under a National Park Service/Wildlife Conservation Society Cooperative Agreement, the authors inventoried amphibians and reptiles at Sagamore Hill NHS (SAHI) on Cove Neck, Oyster Bay, New York from March to September 2002. Six standard sampling methods were used; anuran calling surveys, egg mass counts, visual encounter surveys, coverboards, turtle traps, and minnow traps. The authors recorded animals encountered outside of standard surveys as incidental encounters.

Under a National Park Service/Wildlife Conservation Society Cooperative Agreement, an inventory of amphibians and reptiles at Morristown National Historical Park in New Jersey was conducted from March through September 2000. Six standardized sampling methods were employed; anuran call counts, egg-mass counts, time-constrained search, coverboards, turtle trapping, and minnow trapping. In addition, animals encountered outside of standardized surveys (temporally or spatially) were recorded as incidental encounters.

This document details the amphibian inventories conducted in Mount Rainier National Park primarily from 2001 to 2003 with a small amount of data collected in 2005. These inventories were part of a larger effort to document species presence at five North Coast and Cascade (NCCN) Parks: Mount Rainier National Park (MORA), Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve (EBLA), Lewis and Clark National Historical Site (LEWI), Fort Vancouver National Historical Park (FOVA), and San Juan Island National Historical Park (SAJH).