Keeping It Wild 2 is an interagency strategy to monitor trends in selected attributes of wilderness character based on lessons learned from 15 years of developing and implementing wilderness character monitoring across the National Wilderness Preservation System. This document updates and replaces Keeping It Wild: An Interagency Strategy for Monitoring Wilderness Character Across the National Wilderness Preservation System (Landres and others 2008), and provides a foundation for agencies to develop a nationally consistent approach to implement this monitoring. This monitoring strategy addresses two questions: How do stewardship activities affect attributes of wilderness character? How are attributes selected as integral to wilderness character changing over time within a wilderness, within an agency, and across the National Wilderness Preservation System? The primary audiences for the information from this monitoring are agency staff who manage wilderness day-today , and regional and national staff who develop wilderness policy and assess its effectiveness. The results of this monitoring will provide these staff some of the key data they need to improve wilderness stewardship and wilderness policy. Keeping It Wild 2 is designed to be nationally consistent across the four wilderness managing agencies and locally relevant, to be cost-effective, and to facilitate communication across the many resource programs that are responsible for preserving wilderness character. Implementing this monitoring strategy does not guarantee the preservation of wilderness character, but it informs and improves wilderness stewardship, and ensures managers are accountable to the central mandate of the 1964 Wilderness Act-to preserve wilderness character.

________________________________________One of the central mandates of the 1964 Wilderness Act is that "each agency administering any area designated as wilderness shall be responsible for preserving the wilderness character of the area." Although wilderness comprises about 20 percent of National Forest System lands (over 35 million acres), the agency lacks a way to evaluate progress in fulfilling this mandate. This document, developed by the Forest Service Wilderness Monitoring Committee, lays the conceptual foundation for a national assessment of how wilderness character is changing over time. The purpose of this monitoring is to provide managers a tool they can use to answer key questions about wilderness character and wilderness stewardship:• What is the current state of wilderness character?• How is wilderness character changing over time?• How are stewardship actions affecting wilderness character?• What stewardship priorities and decisions would best preserve wilderness character?This monitoring uses the Section 2(c) Definition of Wilderness from the 1964 Wilderness Act to identify four statutory qualities of wilderness, from which specific monitoring questions and key monitoring indicators are derived. The status and trends of these national indicators are monitored, allowing managers to evaluate how selected conditions and stewardship actions related to wilderness character are changing over time within a wilderness. This Framework provides the conceptual basis for combining this information into a single integrated assessment of wilderness character within an individual wilderness, and whether it is degrading, stable, or improving over time. This information is compiled for upward reporting, allowing regional and national program managers to evaluate how wilderness character is changing and the effectiveness of wilderness programs and policies to preserve wilderness character. No national standards are developed or comparisons made among wildernesses in terms of their wilderness character because each wilderness is unique in its legislative, administrative, social, and biophysical setting. While this monitoring will provide vital information, it is only a portion of what could, and should, be monitored in wilderness and of wilderness character. Keywords

The U.S. Forest Service is responsible for managing over 35 million acres of designated wilderness, about 18 percent of all the land managed by the agency. Nearly all (90 percent) of the National Forests and Grasslands administer designated wilderness. Although the central mandate from the 1964 Wilderness Act is that the administering agencies preserve the wilderness character in these designated areas, the concept of wilderness character has largely been absent in Forest Service efforts to manage wilderness. The purpose of this document is to help National Forest planners, wilderness staff, and project leaders apply in a practical way the concept of wilderness character to forest and project planning, the National Environmental Policy Act process, on-the-ground wilderness management, and wilderness character trend monitoring that is relevant to an individual wilderness.

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