Among the 1,000 National Park Service employees fired on Valentine's Day were researchers and scientists who monitored the health of natural resources, like the forests at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia/NPS, Volunteer Devin Taggart
Go past the visitor center and the restrooms and leave the parking area and you'll enter a realm of the National Park Service that isn't in the public's eye but which is being hit hard and disrupted by the Trump administration's hatchet approach to shrinking federal government.
For while many visitors to the National Park System encounter helpful rangers at information desks and along the trails, those not often seen or heard from are the researchers and resource managers who work to uphold the National Park Service Organic Act's mandate that the Park Service "conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for their enjoyment in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."
There are geologists, archaeologists, paleontologists, botanists, wildlife biologists, fisheries biologists, and historians. The list goes on and on. Their ranks were not spared when 1,000 employees were cut from the Park Service ranks on Valentine's Day.
"I had worked for almost two years as essentially a contract botanist at a different nearby park, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park, another one of our amazing parks in the National Capital Area," said Angela Moxley, who was ten days shy of clearing probation at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia when she was caught up in the terminations. "My expertise there was on imperiled plant species. That particular park has nearly 200 imperiled plant species recorded throughout the years, and we have around 30 at Harpers Ferry."
At Harpers Ferry, Moxley was the only botanist on the park staff. When asked why it matters that the Park Service loses a botanist, one who probably doesn't interact with park visitors, she is quick to respond.
"Plants are the foundation of food webs, they provide food for insects," Moxley explained last week, pointing out that caterpillars native to the Appalachian Mountains where Harpers Ferry lies feed on native plants. In turn, chickadees feed on those caterpillars, she said.
"Why does that matter? Because insects provide food for many of the charismatic species that people care about, birds being really high on that list," she said. "A lot of bird species rely on caterpillars to feed their young."
When invasive vegetation intrudes in those areas, overrunning the native vegetation, those nonnative plants might not be digestible by caterpillars and other insects. "So when we lose native plants, we lose caterpillars and other insects, and there are cascading effects to other species that depend on insects and plants."
That is why, Moxley added, biodiversity is so important for maintaining healthy ecosystems.
"Ecosystem resilience. The more types of species that we have on the landscape, the more those landscapes are able to recover from catastrophes such as drought," she said.
Angela Moxley was working on ecosystem restoration and tree diseases at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park when she was fired/Courtesy of Angela Moxley
At Harpers Ferry, wetlands restoration was among the projects the botantist was working when she lost her job. While crews last fall were removing invasive plants from the wetlands, Moxley was harvesting seeds from the native vegetation that could be used to "build seed mixes that were appropriate for each of the ecosystems."
"I had just worked on my field calendar for the upcoming field season this past week or so and I had actually had plans to go out in March to check the sites and see if anything had started to germinate and determine next steps," she said. "'Do we need to put out more seed? Were those the right species? Do we need to look at getting different seeds? What invasive plants do we still need to remove?'
"And so I just had to walk away from that project in the middle of it, and I'll never know the results, I'll never know whether those seeds germinated and whether those seed mixes worked."
Moxley also was planning to meet with U.S. Forest Service experts to discuss the declining hemlock groves in Harpers Ferry to see what could be done to help them rebound from an infestation of the nonnative hemlock wooly adelgid, an insect that can kill hemlocks.
"I'd also within the past year at Harpers Ferry documented beech leaf disease. This is an emerging disease in the Eastern U.S." the botanist said. "It's an invasive nematode that is killing beech trees. We have a lot of beech trees in Harpers Ferry, and so this could wipe out a lot of the forest. There isn't a treatment yet, but I had started working last year to map out where I was seeing beech leaf disease, and had plans to continue that work and to start working with our regional office and potentially the Forest Service to figure out some kind of a response."
Moxley also was developing a plan of attack for removing invasive vegetation from across the park.
"I had to walk away from a year's worth of sensitive data that I had been collecting about the approximately 30 imperiled plant species that we have at Harpers Ferry," she said. "I had been going out to survey for these plant species and to document them, take photos, map them. I had an elaborate field map that I had set up to collect data while in the field. I had built up all this data and had plans to expand the project and refine it, and I just had to put everything on our shared drive and walk away and hope that someday somebody can use it."
For now, Moxley is looking for a job, speaking out in behalf of the National Park Service, and trying to stay atop the news involving Park Service jobs.
"I've seen so many posts about overflowing toilets. There will also be closed visitor centers. There could be delays in search and rescue responses, and all of that is really, really important," she said. "I'm not trying to say that it's not, but there is also a huge behind-the-scenes effort at national parks to protect the resources that visitors enjoy. We don't typically wear the flat hat, and the visitors may never encounter us, but without us there wouldn't be the resources for the visitors to enjoy. And so I really hope that people, in addition to speaking up for the toilets, can speak up for the forests and the archaeology and the museums."
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