From non-static vignettes to unprecedented change: The U.S. National Park System, climate impacts and animal dispersal

Abstract

US Federal land management agencies and the public are currently facing a challenge unlike any other in history: climate change. In the case of the US National Park Service (NPS), agency action to cope with the problem began in earnest in January 2009. The objective of this review is to provide an assessment of NPS policy statements, plans and on-ground activity for the purpose of reducing the future biological impacts of climate change on US National Park System biota. I looked at Presidential initiatives, Secretarial orders, and agency planning documents, policy statements, reports, and Web sites. I also reviewed the scientific literature. Based on my work experience with the agency, I also illustrate how values influenced NPS natural resources policy evolution. One critical piece of the initiatives toolbox is not being given adequate emphasis: land use planning. Without effective land use planning, some terrestrial park biota will find it difficult or impossible to move to higher latitude and cooler habitat in response to changes in atmospheric temperature and moisture. One technical problem is predicting where to provide corridors and of what dimensions, or preferably a more permeable regional landscape, so certain species can navigate around or through developed land. In many cases, the choices remaining are few since much adjacent natural land is so developed as to be realistically beyond reclamation. The implications of not planning for landscape permeability is that many terrestrial, non-volant park species will likely vanish in a developed, human-dominated mortality sink. Unfortunately, land use planning is a politically volatile topic that federal agencies avoid. American society nevertheless will be forced to deal with the inevitable tension between private land rights and the need to allow protected area biota to move.