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This
site is under construction. Menu items and links will be functional soon.
 Background
Fort
Indiantown Gap National Guard Training Center (FIG-NGTC), located in Dauphin
and Lebanon Counties, Pennsylvania, occupies approximately 17,100 acres
of forest, grassland, and wetlands. Its primary use is the military training
for the active and reserve components of all the armed services. Since
FIG was first established in 1931, much of the land has been protected
from both commercial and agricultural development. To learn more about
FIG's land use and ecology, visit our Site
page.
As required for all
Department of Defense lands, FIG has an active environmental program.
In 2003, FIG contracted with Penn State University's Institutes of the
Environment to conduct a thorough survey of the natural and biological
resources at the training center. This comprehensive survey includes studies
of soil composition, forest types, bird and deer distributions, and one
of the largest site-specific terrestrial arthropod inventories ever undertaken.
This is a cooperative project, involving multiple academic departments
at Penn State University and the Pennsylvania Department of Military and
Veterans Affairs. When the survey is finished, Fort Indiantown Gap personnel
will have the information needed to make sustainable land-use decisions,
and to manage all their resources for both the continuation of training
activities and the further improvement of ecological integrity.
This website is a
summary of the research involving arthropods only. Please use the menu
options above to learn about our sampling methods, and the results we've
obtained so far. In the future, other aspects of the project (birds, mammals,
forestry, soil) may be included here.
Biodiversity
and Ecosystem Management
Ecosystem management considers natural resources in the
context of multidimensional interacting systems that include natural ecosystems
and human activities. This approach to natural resource management aims
to sustain dynamic ecological functions and productivity of ecosystems
by protecting habitats and their biodiversity for specific resource management
units. Ecosystem management is based on site-specific information on habitats
(including physical structure and biodiversity) and human impacts on that
habitat. Ecosystem management involves two processes 1) assessment via
sampling of the occurrence and distribution pattern of biodiversity and
the physical structure of the ecosytem, and 2) monitoring of ecological
changes in biodiversity at scales representing habitats, watersheds, ecosystems,
and landscapes. Thus, a biodiversity profile represents
the description of species composition in a defined sampling unit, whereas
ecosytem profile represents the description of biodiversity
profile along with the physical habitat structure of that unit. References.
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