Resist, Accept or Direct: How Parks Are Managing Climate Change

Faced with climate change, park managers can resist it (hold on to current conditions), accept it (let change happen) or direct it (steer toward a new, preferred condition). Seven parks show the RAD framework in action.

Cuyahoga Valley: accepting a newcomer

Black locust. Larry Allain / USGS.

In northeastern Ohio, the park spends heavily on invasive species, including black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), native to southern Ohio, southwestern Pennsylvania and further south. Until recently it was resisted as an invader. With warming temperatures and more rain projected, the park now sees it as a regionally native species shifting north with the climate — unlike problem species from outside North America — and accepts it. That saves money, and recognizes that conservation now means working with climate-driven redistribution of native species.

Glacier: directing bull trout to safety

Bull trout. USGS.

Warming water from melting glaciers and hotter air, plus competition from invasive lake trout, threatened native bull trout in the Logging Creek drainage with extirpation. Park staff moved bull trout above an impassable waterfall into Grace Lake, with cooler water and no lake trout — directing the population to newly suitable habitat, and changing the ecology of upper Logging Creek, already altered by introduced Yellowstone cutthroat trout. The park keeps rearing and releasing more bull trout and monitoring them. More.

Indiana Dunes: accepting a loss

The park once held one of the largest populations of the endangered Karner blue butterfly — at the warmest edge of its range, which has warmed considerably since the mid-20th century. Local populations declined together from the early 2000s until an extreme heat wave in summer 2012 wiped out the remnants; the last two were seen in 2014. Captive rearing and release failed to resist the decline. The park has accepted the loss and now manages the habitat for other savanna specialists.

Rocky Mountain: all three

Koren Nydick / NPS.

• Resist: streamside areas are declining under grazing by elk and deer, shifting toward grassland that offers less and will cope worse with future change. In the Kawuneeche Valley, the park proposes restoring streams and wetlands to keep healthy willow–beaver wetlands.
• Accept: in severely burned wilderness, changing fire regimes may turn forests and wetlands into different ecosystems.
• Direct: in lodgepole pine forests near communities, thinning and burning fuels to favor aspen. More.

Capitol Reef: the right tool for each place

NPS.

In southern Utah's Upper South Desert, Capitol Reef:

• accepts limited change in retired grazing allotments with healthy natives, strong soil crusts and few invasives, while monitoring;
• accepts change in badly invaded areas until restoration is feasible;
• resists the loss of imperiled plants such as the Last Chance townsendia and Wright's fishhook cactus by controlling invasives;
• directs change in transitioning zones, following USGS RestoreNet guidance and digging pits that hold moisture, soil and seed.

Limited resources go where they do the most good. More.

Haleakalā: resisting extinction

A kiwikiu. Chris Warren (NPS / Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project).

Hawaii's honeycreepers evolved nowhere else. Avian malaria, spread by mosquitoes that arrived with people, swept the islands in the early 1900s, and with habitat loss drove the birds from lower forests. Now warming pushes mosquitoes upslope into the birds' last high-elevation refuges, while climate change may lower the top of the cloud forest, trapping them in a shrinking band. Haleakalā is resisting with the Wolbachia incompatible insect technique, using a bacterium to suppress mosquitoes. More.

Denali: a road on thawing ground

The Denali Park Road. NPS photo / Kent Miller.

The 92-mile Denali Park Road is the only road across six million acres of wilderness, a lifeline for staff and visitors along the 600-mile Alaska Range. Built on permafrost now thawing with rising temperatures, it is slowly — and ever faster — sliding downhill. The park is using the RAD framework to decide how to respond. More.

Sources

Based on "Resisting, accepting, and directing change in parks," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The page's Karner blue butterfly photograph, credited to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, is not reproduced.