Alaskan national parks include some of the last remaining wilderness areas of the world. In order to protect and manage these parks, National Park Service (NPS) managers need to know how and why park ecosystems change over time, and what amount of change is within the historic range of variability. The Service's Inventory and Monitoring (I&M) Program addresses this need by providing park managers with information on status and trends for key elements of park ecosystems. The Southwest Alaska Network (SWAN), one of 32 monitoring networks in the I&M Program, has identified a suite of physical and biological elements for monitoring. Many of these require ground-based sampling.