Climate Change and Cultural Landscapes: Understanding the Change

Understanding the science

The Park Service's response to climate change depends on good information, shared among scientists, resource professionals, partners and Indigenous peoples, to understand how climate affects park resources.

Cultural Landscape Reports, Cultural Landscapes Inventory reports and National Register forms document, evaluate and guide treatment of cultural landscapes. NPS.

The NPS gathers a great deal about how each landscape has changed: photos, aerials, historic maps, correspondence, descriptions, numerical data. Together with existing-condition analysis, modeling, historical research and natural resource monitoring, it shows past climate, future projections and likely effects on resources and operations.

• Sharing knowledge: the story of change and its evidence go into Cultural Landscape Reports (CLRs), Cultural Landscapes Inventories (CLIs) and National Register nominations.
• Tracking change: preservation means documenting change, finding vulnerable resources and sensitive natural systems, defining historic character and guiding treatment. CLI condition updates and treatment records, with standard methods, reveal shifts in vegetation, forest cover, rainfall, waterways and landforms.

Big Hole National Battlefield: a forest that shaped a battle

Plant surveying at Big Hole National Battlefield, 2011. NPS / Upper Columbia Basin Network.

On August 9 and 10, 1877, Nez Perce people and U.S. Army troops fought at what became Big Hole National Battlefield. The land, Nez Perce traditions and the battle are closely bound: the lodgepole pine forest on the hillside, dense willow thickets by the river, a camas meadow and a high bench to the south all shaped the choice of camp and the fighting, and battle accounts and drawings recorded them.

The landscape still looks much as participants saw it, but farming nearby, roads, visitor facilities and changing conditions brought invasive species.

• 1910s–1920s: a pine beetle blight began devastating forests around the Big Hole Valley.
• 1980s: the NPS and Forest Service restored the hillside siege area to its forest pattern at the time of the battle.
• Recently: prescribed burns keep new conifers off historically open hillside and thin the willows in the bottomland.

The willows near the Nez Perce camp both concealed and trapped fighters in August 1877; some deaths on both sides are partly attributed to them. NPS.

Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park: apple blossoms as a clock

Seasonal timing drives ecological processes, and knowing it matters for treating invasive species, running facilities and scheduling events like flower festivals. NPS and partner researchers collect data across the country to model dates of first leaf and first bloom against their historical range.

When sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens came to Cornish in the summer of 1885, it was a working farm landscape. In 1891 he bought a farm, later called Aspet, and added classical gardens, outdoor rooms, geometric flower beds and hedges, alongside fields, forest and apple trees. Tracking when those apple trees bloom shows how the seasons have shifted since his day.

An apple tree at Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park, whose blooming dates track seasonal change. NPS.

Redwood National Park: prairies under pressure

The Lyons Ranches Historic District, in the Bald Hills of Redwood National Park, holds upland prairies, oak woodlands and conifer forest in the Redwood Creek watershed, including eight prairies from the Lyons family's sheep-ranching era after 1868. Climate trends threaten it:

• longer droughts raise fire danger;
• Douglas fir and invasive species shrink the prairies and blur their edges;
• flash floods raise flood hazard;
• buildings are exposed to high winds and storms.

A prairie management plan, including prescribed burns, targets invasive California oat grass and encroaching Douglas fir, with continued monitoring.

Prairie along Bald Hills Road, Redwood National Park, May 2018. NPS.

Boston Harbor Islands: a sumac baseline

At Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area, a phenology study set a baseline for when staghorn sumac, a common native of the Northeast and Great Lakes lowlands, leafs out. Long-term monitoring may reveal a climate effect on that timing.

Sources

Based on "Climate Change and Cultural Landscapes: Understand," part of the series Climate Change Response Strategy and Cultural Landscapes, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The series continues with Adapt.