Climate Change and Cultural Landscapes: A Draft Manual for Research, Planning and Stewardship

Cultural landscapes across the National Park System are suffering serious impacts from climate change — both events such as hurricanes and storms and trends such as drought — forcing park managers into difficult decisions about how to manage and protect them.

With a grant from NCPTT, the University of Oregon drafted a manual on how managers can respond; at the time of this report it was a work in progress, expected in fall 2016.

How it was built

The manual draws on a review of climate research, cultural landscape documentation and evaluation methods, and fieldwork in 2014 at six park sites, chosen for their range of ecological and landscape types:

At Saint-Gaudens, for example, an allée of birch trees that screens views and encloses the landscape could be lost as the trees' growing range shifts; at Dyke Marsh, remnant dike structures are threatened by rising water and more frequent storms.

The framework

A decision tree in three stages — research, planning and stewardship — and seven adaptation options, which can be combined:

1. no active intervention;
2. offset stresses;
3. improve resilience;
4. manage change;
5. relocate or facilitate movement;
6. document, and don't intervene;
7. interpret the change for visitors.

They're meant as general guidance, since every site also faces pressures of budget, staffing, planning priorities and available knowledge. The work builds on Park Service procedures for Cultural Landscape Inventories and Cultural Landscape Reports, and on the NPS Director's Memo 14-02 on climate change and cultural resource stewardship.

Who did it

Principal investigator Robert Melnick, professor of landscape architecture at the University of Oregon, and two graduate students, working with site managers at all six parks, the Park Cultural Landscapes Program Manager, the NPS Climate Change Adaptation Coordinator for Cultural Resources, the Northeast Region's Chief of Resource Planning and Compliance, and the Pacific West Region's Cultural Landscapes Inventory Coordinator.

Part of the series Using Science to Preserve the Past · previous: Archaeological field school at Honouliuli National Monument · next: Women in Archaeology at Fort Vancouver.

Sources

Based on "Climate Change and Cultural Landscapes: Research Planning and Stewardship (2015-02)," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. Photographs by the project team are not reproduced.