Global climate research

In a small cabin that serves as the Glacier National Park climate change office, Dan Fagre clicks through photos that clearly show the massive glaciers that give this park its name in a hasty retreat. “There was a hundred square kilometers of ice in 1850,” Fagre, a United States Geological Survey researcher who has studied the glaciers of Glacier since 1991, explains. “We are down to 14 to 15 square kilometers, so an 85 to 86 percent loss of ice in the park. There’s no doubt they are going to disappear unless some massive cooling happens,” he says, which isn’t likely. The flows of mountain streams and rivers throughout the park will dwindle as their sources melt. And one species that will dearly miss the ice-cold runoff from the glaciers is the meltwater stonefly, an insect that’s only found in a few glacier-fed streams in the park. It will likely disappear when the glaciers vanish, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says. As the United States marks the centennial of the National Park Service, which was officially established 100 years ago this week, the nation’s parks are being widely celebrated for their natural grandeur and vistas, their wildlife, and their abundant recreational opportunities. Far less appreciated though is the critical role that the U.S.’s 59 national parks and hundreds of other park service units play in scientific research, providing unspoiled, protected, and accessible landscapes that host research that can be done in few other places. In fact, with a long history of data and field study on everything from wildlife to wildfires, the national parks offer scientists an incredibly rare living outdoor lab. And the high profile of the parks in the American imagination often provides an avenue for conveying that research to the public. Science and science education has long been a key part of the National Park Service’s mission. Research in the parks has blossomed to the point where there currently are scientists working in about 289 of the 412 national park units (which include national monuments and historic sites), conducting some 4,000 experiments. Since 2000, there have been 28,000 studies.

The work falls into two main categories — research done to aid park management, more general research on issues that range from climate change to ecological restoration, and even on new products such as medicines or industrial materials, and technologies. “Our lands are the least impacted in the U.S.,” says Kirsten Gallo, chief of the park service’s National Inventory and Monitoring Division, the agency that oversees park research. There is a lot of research seeking to understand the “reference” conditions in national parks, she says, which serves as a baseline indicating the original natural variability of ecosystems and providing a guide for ecological restoration elsewhere. Subheading: The parks are playing a key role in research to determine how climate change will impact protected ecosystems.

These days, climate change, which President Obama has called the greatest threat to the nation’s parks, is one of the park service’s most important science missions. The parks currently are playing a key role both in global climate research and in efforts to determine how climate change will impact protected ecosystems — from the glaciers of Glacier National Park in Montana, to the giant forests of Sequoia National Park in California, to the East Coast beaches of Assateague Island National Seashore — and in finding possible ways to adapt. Patrick Gonzalez, a principal climate change scientist for the National Park Service, says the intact natural landscapes of parks provide climate researchers with a picture of how natural ecosystems, free from most kinds of human influence, are responding to warming. ————————————————————————- Answer: What issues remain critical at the National Parks in the immediate future? Write in your own words Answer: What policies or perspectives do the articles highlight in addressing critical concerns at the National Parks in the coming years? Write in your own words