4th Annual Threatened And Endangered Parks

As societies around the globe recognize with great concern the declines, drastic in some cases, of wildlife and wild places, the National Park System, a key to preserving nature and its life forms in the United States, is facing a confluence of challenges that could jeopardize efforts to reverse some of those declines. At the same time, the National Park Service seemingly is facing an uphill struggle to care for the rich cultural and natural resources placed in its care.

Look out across the park system and you can find marine parks threatened by human pollution and politics, desert parks rived by flood waters (photo above from Death Valley National Park) coastal parks losing ground to the Atlantic Ocean, majestic trees at risk from the warming climate and wildfires, and understaffed parks struggling to manage visitors and protect resources. The cascading effects of climate change, including severe storms and rising seas, are also causing major headaches for culture resource managers throughout the National Park System. Preservation projects will require not just traditional restoration, but also reinforcement or relocation of park resources.

Some of these impacts are just a moment in time, others are becoming entrenched. The National Park Service is working hard to counter these challenges and is making progress in some areas but, combined, the risks to the park system are not insignificant.

In this, the National Parks Traveler's 4th Annual Threatened and Endangered Parks package, we take a look at some of the pressure points and efforts to mitigate them. The charts below are not intended to be all-inclusive of endangered and threatened parks, but rather reflective of the issues challenging the entire park system.

We'd be remiss if we didn't point to the progress being made on deferred maintenance and repairs thanks to the Great American Outdoors Act and the $13.5 billion being spread across the public lands infrastructure to address some of the backlog. But, to put it bluntly, it's not enough. The current backlog costs in the National Park System alone are estimated to be around $21 billion. And that doesn't begin to cover the costs the Park Service is going to encounter in the years ahead as it works to cope with climate-change impacts.

To properly care for the "best idea" America ever had, the Congress is going to have to shift its philosophy on funding the Park Service and dealing with the impacts of climate change. Whether it will remains to be seen.

Wildfires, such as the Washburn Fire that threatened Yosemite's Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias, are a growing threat to the park system/NPS file

Wildfires, such as the Washburn Fire that threatened Yosemite's Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias last summer, are a growing threat to the park system/NPS file

Climate Change's Grip On The Park System

By Kurt Repanshek

Water, the universal solvent, is eroding parts of the National Park System. It is slowly overcoming Cape Hatteras National Seashore and has done significant damage to Yellowstone and Death Valley national parks, as well as Mojave National Preserve and Vicksburg National Military Park. And with climate change, it is gaining strength.

All coastal units of the National Park System are at risk not just from rising sea levels, but more potent hurricanes. Inland, floodwaters are tearing apart park roads, unearthing remains of Civil War soldiers, burying areas in rubble, and washing down mountain slopes denuded of soil-holding vegetation by wildfires.

As much as underfunding, understaffing, backlogged maintenance and outside factors are threatening and endangering the parks, climate change is raising the risk ratio for many of them. The changing conditions impact glaciers, flora and fauna, infrastructure, and even visitation patterns.

"[T]he Park Service budget is not where it needs to be to address all these existential and other crises that they’re having," said Kristen Brengel, senior vice president for government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association.

"It’s just sad at this point that we’re not able to really address the climate issue in particular in a really aggressive way with the Park Service. We’re going to be able to potentially do it in some places, but not everywhere."

Read the story.

Staffing Struggles Across The Park System

By Lori Sonken

Visitors used to come to Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado in December to see lantern-lit cliff dwellings where the Ancestral Puebloans lived. The last two years the park cancelled Luminaria due to the weather and pandemic. But during the 2022 holidays, construction on the Mesa Top Loop and staff shortages prevented the park from safely hosting the event.

Staffing woes aren't unique to Mesa Verde. Indeed, they abound across the National Park System.

Using the annual budget justifications submitted to the Congress each year with the President’s budget request and the NPS Stats Database, the Traveler compared the number of full-time employees working in the National Park Service from 2000 to 2019 (pre-COVID) and examined park visitation levels during the same time period. Of the 68 national parks and national seashores surveyed, more than half experienced a decline in the number of employees the past two decades. All but 18 saw more visitors.

In 2001, the National Park Service had 2,417 more employees than the agency supported in 2020, when there were 34 more park units, according to the agency’s budget justifications for fiscal years 2002 and 2022.

“Superintendents often do not have the resources to identify the cultural and natural resources that are threatened by climate change,” said John Garder, senior director of budget and appropriations for the National Parks Conservation Association.

Read the story.

How Can Cultural Treasures Be Saved?

By Kim O'Connell

The cascading effects of climate change, including severe storms and rising seas, are causing major headaches for culture resource managers throughout the National Park System. Preservation projects will require not just traditional restoration but also reinforcement or relocation of park resources.

In the American Southwest, water is essential but often scarce. Ancient and Indigenous people learned to work with the water that was available, to follow the natural courses and cycles of water as it moved across the landscape. Today, climate change has disrupted those natural patterns, creating drought conditions that have brought the Colorado River and other Western waterways to historically low levels.

But too much water, not the lack of it, is also causing problems in the Southwest, particularly at historic sites such as Tumacácori National Historical Park in Arizona and Pecos National Historical Park in New Mexico, which both maintain historically significant adobe structures. Here, climate change has caused increasingly severe rainstorms that have had profound impacts on the historic earthen walls found in these two parks.

Other water-related issues, such as storms, flooding, and sea level rise, have wreaked havoc on cultural and historic sites elsewhere in the park system, too, including Statue of Liberty National Monument, Colonial National Historical Park and the Jamestown Settlement, and Castillo de San Marcos National Monument.

Read the story.

GAOA Funneling Billions To Repair Parks

By Lori Sonken

Across the National Park System, hundreds of millions of dollars obtained through the Great American Outdoors Act were put to work in the parks this past year.

One of the 81 National Park Service projects funded in Fiscal Years 2021 and 2022 is rehabilitation work at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park. Enacted in 2020, GAOA established the Legacy Restoration Fund to address overdue maintenance needs at four federal agencies, including the Park Service. Under the law, the agency will receive $6.5 billion over five years for deferred maintenance and repairs -– the estimate of how much it costs to repair and restore deteriorating assets to an acceptable and safe condition.

It's a good start, but meager in the big picture.

The Park Service's deferred maintenance and repair backlog is $21.8 billion; that includes $7.1 billion needed for buildings, $5.2 billion for paved roads, and $1.3 billion for water systems. Other assets requiring repair include wastewater systems expected to cost $855 million; unpaved roads, $812 million; trails, $436 million; housing, $253 million; and campgrounds, $129 million. The GAOA won’t meet all needs but is expected to put a dent in the DM&R backlog.

Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Cam Sholly said the Park Service must protect its GAOA investments by making cyclical maintenance “so we don’t fall back into deferred maintenance in future years.”

Read the story.

Endangered Parks


Park	Risks
Biscayne National Park, Florida	Urban pollution, lack of protected marine reserve along the Florida Reef.
Cape Hatteras National Seashore, North Carolina	Sea level rise, more potent storms.
Everglades National Park, Florida	Invasive species, sea-level rise.
Fort Pulaski National Monument, Georgia	Sea-level rise, more potent storms
Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Utah/Arizona	Drought impacting recreation and revealing archaeological resoures.
Historic Jamestowne	Sea-level rise inundating archaeological sites.
Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Nevada	Drought impacting recreation.
Minidoka National Historic Site, Idaho	Insufficient staffing and funding to interpret Japanese-American incarceration during World War II
Sequoia National Park, California	Climate change, wildfires, decline of sequoia trees

Threatened Parks


Park	Risks
Acadia National Park, Maine	Overcrowding impacting visitor experience and leading to resource damage.
Big Cypress National Preserve, Florida	Oil exploration and production
Great Smoky Mountains National Park, North Carolina/Tennessee	Overcrowding impacting visitor experience and leading to resource damage.
Joshua Tree National Park, California	Climate change, decline of Joshua trees
Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, Vermont	Facility deterioration, lack of museum-quality conditions for artworks
National Park Service, nationally	Underfunded, understaffed, low morale, lack of diversity.
Parks in Alaska	Climate change, sea level rise, glacial retreat
Tumacácori National Historical Park, Arizona	Storm events weakening, and sometimes collapsing, adobe walls.
Zion National Park, Utah	Overcrowding impacting visitor experience and leading to resource damage.

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