The National Park Service's 2023 Director's Awards for Natural and Cultural Resources

Each year the National Park Service honors employees whose work protecting natural and cultural resources goes beyond their day-to-day duties — people who solve problems or create new opportunities through creative thinking and action. These were the 2023 winners.

Cultural resources

Mark Wimmer became superintendent of Katahdin Woods and Waters in Maine in 2022 and immediately made relationships with Tribes a priority. He and his staff created many ways for Tribal leaders and resource managers to take a real part in decisions. In 2023 the monument signed a formal General Agreement with the Penobscot Indian Nation, built on co-stewardship and consensus decision-making with sovereign Indigenous Nations — the first of its kind for a Park Service unit east of the Appalachian Trail. The agreement is already shaping programs that honor Indigenous culture and history and bring more Tribal citizens into the park, and it makes the monument a leader in the Northeast in co-stewardship, Tribal data sovereignty and the use of traditional knowledge.

David Goto. From the National Park Service's announcement of the awards.

David Goto led the 2023 restoration of two landmarks at Manzanar, where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II:

• Merritt Park, once a source of pride for the incarcerated community, who embraced their heritage even as they were persecuted for it. Survivors, their descendants, local Tribal members and others had made its restoration a top priority.
• The Wilder Apple Orchard, first planted in 1910, abandoned as Los Angeles bought up the valley's water rights, and revived by the people incarcerated there.

Drawing on his training as an arborist, Goto designed and supervised the work, leading staff, contractors and volunteers in recreating the original ground contours, installing irrigation, laying out paths and planting beds, and choosing heirloom apple varieties to evoke the original orchard. In August 2023, Tropical Storm Hilary buried the new plantings in silt and mud and cut gullies that threatened the orchard's irrigation. Goto organized emergency repairs, including a conveyor belt system that dug the sediment out of the ponds and used it to fill the gullies. Members of his own family were incarcerated at Manzanar. He cares for more than 350 historic orchard trees.

Members of the Wahhoga Committee, the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation and National Park Service staff in front of the returned Wilson Cabin; Echo Davenport is third from left in the front row. Credit: National Park Service.

Erin "Echo" Davenport, Yosemite's archeological compliance program manager, made possible the return of the historic Wilson Cabin to Wahhoga Village. Wahhoga holds thousands of years of Indigenous residence and use. In the 1930s it became a 15-cabin settlement for Native American park employees and their families; in 1969 the Park Service evicted the residents and burned the buildings, sparing only the Wilson Cabin, which it moved for its own use. Planning to restore the village as an Indian Cultural Center began in the 1970s, and a 2018 cooperative agreement with the American Indian Council of Mariposa County set the site aside for traditional cultural use. Returning the cabin had been a goal for years, stalled by planning issues, complex regulations and many relationships inside and outside the park. Davenport brought together divisions across the park, from forestry and utilities to wildlife management, to make it happen. She credits the Southern Sierra Miwuk/American Indian Council of Mariposa County with leading the move, and describes the park's role as co-stewardship.

Natural resources

Dale Meyerhoeffer. From the National Park Service's announcement of the awards.

• Dale Meyerhoeffer, forest health lead at Shenandoah, set out to save the park's remaining eastern hemlocks after the invasive hemlock woolly adelgid killed 95 percent of them. With Virginia Tech researchers he made six releases of 2,700 predatory Laricobius beetles and two releases of 270 predatory Leucotaraxis flies, both specific to the adelgid, to reduce the park's reliance on pesticides. In 2023 he found excellent beetle survival at several sites — a major step toward making biological control the main tool for saving the hemlocks.
• Kate Miller has monitored forests for the Northeast Temperate and Mid-Atlantic networks since 2007. Her most recent paper, on white-tailed deer and invasive plants, raised the alarm about the future of eastern forests and led to the Resilient Forest Initiative, which in two years brought managers together and helped win millions of dollars in funding for forest projects through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act.
• Ashley Rawhouser, resources chief at North Cascades, has been the lead negotiator for the park and the Park Service in the proposed 50-year Federal Energy Regulatory Commission relicensing of the Skagit River Hydropower Project, working with Tribes and First Nations, federal, state and county agencies and many organizations to design studies, develop protection, mitigation and enhancement measures, and settlement agreements.
• Christopher Loft, facility manager at Katahdin Woods and Waters, managed contracts in 2023 for bridge and culvert improvements designed to help endangered Atlantic salmon pass, working with Tribes and state partners and combining funding over several fiscal years, including from the Inflation Reduction Act.
• Kayla Fermin, natural resource program manager at Lewis and Clark, represented the park with old and new partners while a colleague was on a detail, mentored interns and local high school students, co-led a hike and a kayak tour for the Park Service Director and Regional Director, and, at the Director's suggestion, encouraged the park to approach the Ancestral Lands Corps about a new Indigenous-focused internship.
• Jen Nersesian, superintendent of Gateway, has used the park's urban setting to reach under-served communities as new visitors and conservation partners. In 2023 her work included wetland banking, nature-based solutions for flooding at Jamaica Bay with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, co-leading the servicewide group developing a coastal investment decision framework, and volunteering Gateway to test a climate-ready checklist and join an Inflation Reduction Act coastal facilities adaptation project.

Sources

Based on "2023 Director's Awards for Natural and Cultural Resources," National Park Service, a work of the United States government in the public domain.