National Parks Traveler

The Swift fox avoided extinction thanks to collaborative efforts and protected habitat/(c) Greg Lasley, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

National Park System Expansion Is Key To Biodiversity Protection

By Kurt Repanshek

Barely 7 pounds in weight and maybe a foot tall, the Swift fox historically was synonymous with North America’s shortgrass prairie and grasslands that once blanketed mid-continent. Spending most of its days in a burrow, the fox came out at night to hunt small prey in the rolling landscape of buffalo grass, bluegrass, and wheatgrass.

But the species, the smallest of foxes, was almost lost to history due to early 20th-century predator eradication programs and habitat loss.

Even today the house-cat-sized predator occupies only about 40 percent of its historic range of grasslands. But, without a determined recovery plan that included state, tribal, and conservation stakeholders in ten states, it might not even have had that much. Three decades ago, when 90 percent of the species’ original habitat was without the Swift fox, those groups set out on an ambitious plan to both return the predators to areas of their historic habitat and to restore grassland ecosystems. 

Not only did the work launched in 1992 succeed in the United States, but it also saw the diminutive fox reappear in parts of Canada.

The success story of the Swift fox not only is an example of how collaboration between various entities can bring a species back from the brink of extinction, but also one that shows how foresight leading to action can prevent a species from being listed under the Endangered Species Act. It also underscores the value the National Park System holds today, and offers for tomorrow, for protecting biodiversity.

“National Parks … aim to protect important natural and cultural values for current and future generations to enjoy unimpaired,” said Rebecca Epanchin-Niell, a University of Maryland associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics. “That unimpairment aspect is really important for biodiversity protection as well. I think national parks are an important ‘tool in the tool box’ for protecting biodiversity, even if it is not the only tool.”

Earlier this year Epanchin-Niell and two colleagues documented how protected lands such as national parks, and collective preemptive efforts, can keep species from being listed as threatened or endangered under the ESA.

“Preemptive conservation efforts are one policy approach that can help stem these challenges [preventing species extinction] and serve as an important pathway for conservation of imperiled species,” they found after studying 314 species considered for listing between 1996 and 2018.

While expanding the National Park System would no doubt be a costly proposition in dollars and human resources for the National Park Service, failing to do so would also be costly for biodiversity.

"The Park Service is never going to have enough money unless somebody on high comes down and mana from heaven drops down on the Park Service. The critical piece to think about is what are we about to lose," stressed Elaine Leslie, the Park Service's chief of biological resources before she retired. "I don't think you can put money as the forefront issue for not adding to the National Park System. We certainly want park units to be fully funded now, and they're not. But I don't think that should be the prohibition from adding new units to the system."

A Rough Roadmap

Viewed by many, if not most, park visitors as spectacular playgrounds, national parks also hold some spectacular pockets of biodiversity. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is home to more than 19,000 species, including 100 species of trees. Biscayne National Park is home to more than 1,000 species of plants, birds, fish, and mammals. Congaree National Park is said to have the most animal biodiversity per 100 square kilometers, at 362. Cuyahoga Valley National Park reportedly ranks No. 1 in terms of plant species per 100 square kilomters, with 935. 

But there are many gaps, areas that would benefit from the protection the National Park System provides natural resources. Despite several efforts dating to the 1930s, there is no expansive Great Plains National Park that would preserve the tallgrass prairie and its resident flora and fauna (although there are national parks that capture small segments of this ecotype). Coastal marine waters that are extremely biodiverse and serve as highways for right whales and humpback whales up and down the East Coast lack protection from shipping.

"The headwaters of major rivers deserve additional consideration for protection because they support a wide array of human and ecosystem services such as clean water, healthy plant and wildlife populations, power generation, and economic benefits for downstream communities," notes a 2017 National Park Service report.

If the country is going to meet the Biden administration's goal of protecting 30 percent of its lands and waters by 2030, expanding the park system to provide the highest level of protection makes sense. 

The National Park Service was given that message more than a decade ago, when the National Park System Advisory Board was told to, “[E]nvision a conservation system that is large and connected enough for organisms to adapt and evolve to changing environmental conditions and sustain the integrity, diversity and health of the ecological and evolutionary processes and associated ecological services in the parks.”

Such a system, continued the message from three conservationists, “would help ensure resilience in the face of climate, land-use change and other environmental stressors.”

But since that report, Natural Resources Gap Analysis: Conservation Tools for National Parks System Management in a Changing World, was presented in 2012, a definitive roadmap for achieving its goals has proven elusive.

Jodi Hilty, one of the authors who then worked for the Wildlife Conservation Society and today is president and chief scientist of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, was quick to answer when asked whether the conservation system that she, Michael Scott of the University of Idaho, and Craig Groves of The Nature Conservancy envisioned had come about.

“No, it’s not,” she said. “It's not the first time that scientists have suggested that we need this. There have been a lot of calls to create a national system for conservation.”

The United States government also has not formally ratified the Convention for Biological Diversity, which requires member countries to develop a National Biodiversity Strategic Action Plan, said Hilty.

“I think for all intents and purposes, right now the U.S. is acting in many ways like a signatory,” she continued. “They have the America the Beautiful [program] moving forward. But what we haven't seen is a coherent, singular strategy of where does the United States want to go? And what are its conservation priorities going forward?

" ... I think part of the challenge in the U.S. around getting to a national biodiversity strategy has been twofold," added Hilty. "One is sort of the tension between state power and federal power. And the other being tensions among the federal agencies, who all sort of in some ways compete against each other, even though they shouldn't."

The Interior Department along with the White House's Council on Environmental Quality and the Departments of Agriculture and Commerce have since January 2022 been working on assembling an "American Conservation and Stewardship Atlas," a database to reflect baseline information on the lands and waters that are conserved or restored. Multiple inquiries to the Interior Department for more information on this project and where it stands were not answered. However, a private group working to launch a "New National Parks" campaign has compiled a list of more than 100 areas around the country that would add missing biodiversity pockets to the park system.

Among areas on the list that the group claims are not represented within the National Park System are the central Great Plains of Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas; the Willamette Valley ecoregion of Washington and Oregon; the Northwestern glaciated plains in Montana and the Dakotas; the northern Minnesota wetlands; and the Yukon flats in Alaska. There also are dozens of areas the group maintains are inadequately represented in the park system.

"What we did is look at ecoregions, which the EPA has laid out, level three ecoregions," said Michael Kellett, co-founder and executive director of the New England-based conservation group, Restore the North Woods. "And if you start looking at it, it starts to zero in on where there are big gaps, and it's pretty much the entire East other than the Appalachians."

While Great Smoky Mountains National Park is viewed as a relative hotbed of biodiversity, Kellett argues that at 522,427 acres the park is not big enough to accommodate wolves. "But there are opportunities to expand it to include the [531,148-acres] Nantahala [National Forest], the [500,000+-acre] Pisgah [National Forest] and part of the [650,000-acre] Cherokee National Forest," he said. "Shenandoah National Park could be expanded to include the George Washington and Jefferson national forests, which are adjacent. The central and southern Appalachians are considered one of the top hotspots in the United States for biodiversity."

30 by 30

“Conservation priorities” can be a moving target in the United States, as priorities often change from presidential administration to presidential administration. While the Trump administration prioritized economic development over conservation of nature, the Biden administration has swung 180 degrees, stating that the country must preserve 30 percent of its lands and waters for biodiversity by 2030.

It has a long way to go.

Margaret Walls, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C., said that only about 14.2 percent of lands in the country carry the highest levels of protection, “having permanent protection from conversion of natural land cover and a mandated management plan in operation to maintain a natural state.”

On paper that percentage could be more than doubled, she said.

“We did some calculations that involved how much [Bureau of Land Management] and [Forest Service] land could be placed in a more protective status (like a national park),” Walls added in an email. The result: if all BLM and Forest Service lands were given the highest levels of protection, the United States could claim 673 million acres of protected lands, or almost 30 percent of the country’s land area.

A live oak in the shell mounds area of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta/©Beth Maynor Finch

But that doesn’t necessarily mean those 673 million acres would capture the most biodiverse acres, because there are places in the country with robust biodiversity that are outside the BLM, FS, and NPS landscapes. One example is the Mobile-Tensaw of Alabama.

The region counts at least nine significant rivers and drains a watershed of about 260,000 acres. It's home to 126 fish species, 46 species of mammals, 69 reptilian species, 30 amphibian species, and at least 300 bird species, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama. Forests at various elevations reach into the sky with bald cypress, tupelo gum, longleaf pine, water hickory, laurel oak and live oak, bitternut hickory, white oak, and even spruce pine, just to list some of the species. 

"It's the center of oak diversity in North America, north of Mexico. It's the center of magnolia diversity in North America. It's the center of hickory diversity, globally. It's the center of sunflower diversity, globally. It's the center of turtle diversity in the Western Hemisphere," said Bill Finch, who has spent more than three decades working on conservaton in Alabama and today is the founding director of the nonprofit Paint Rock Forest Research Center in the state.

"The biodiversity of this place is more and more amazing than any place I've seen in the Lower 48," said Leslie, who visited there when she worked for the Park Service. 

A 2020 Defenders of Wildlife report that looked out across the country to find the most biodiverse areas concluded that preserving 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters is possible, but the approach to conserving areas needs to be very focused on the most biodiverse areas.

“Critically, current protections regularly don’t overlap with areas essential for conserving imperiled species biodiversity and mitigating climate change impacts through carbon sequestration,” the report notes.

“The Defenders of Wildlife report is interesting … because it looks more at the biodiversity issue, showing that most biodiversity hot spots [80 percent, notes the Defenders report] in the U.S. are not where we have protected lands,” said Walls. “So, I guess a logical next step might be to argue for protection of these lands, perhaps as national parks.”

Much remains to be determined. How are “conserved” and “restored” defined? What connectivity will be sought? The Council on Environmental Quality back in March gave federal agencies six months to outline how they can develop or restore and protect ecological corridors, including those relied upon by wildlife during their migrations.

Whether that information will be corralled by September remains to be seen.

To capture the most biodiversity, new models of conservation might be needed.

"Some of the most biodiverse land is in private hands," noted Kristen Brengel, senior vice president for government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association. "And so you have to continuously create models to add protection. I don't work on conservation easements, but we should evaluate whether that's providing the protection, and if it is, great. If we need something else, we should talk about that. To me the fact that we passed the Great American Outdoors Act and now we have the Land and Water Conservation Fund that's permanently funded at $900 million a year, it really creaets a situation where the federal government can offer to buy some of these areas to protect them.

"The only issue is whether it's a Jigsaw puzzle or it's a really well intact land purchase that you can make."

Missing Biodiversity

Three federal agencies manage the bulk of public lands in the United States: the Bureau of Land Management (245 million acres), U.S. Forest Service (193 million), and National Park Service (~85 million). Arguably, though, the Park Service’s guiding principles trump those of the BLM and Forest Service, which both are focused on multiple use of resources, when it comes to preserving, or conserving, natural resources. And so, if more biodiversity is to be protected in the United States, it would make sense that much of it be protected through expansion of the National Park System.

When the National Park Service System Plan of 2017 was written, it considered some of the biodiversity that was missing from the park system.

“Of the primary terrestrial ecosystems in the United States, 111 are completely unrepresented in the National Park System, and 392 ecosystems (55%) are underrepresented in the National Park System (underrepresented is defined as an ecosystem with less than 5% of its total land mass held in protection),” the plan’s authors said.

“Additionally, there are other important natural resources and ecosystems that have essentially zero conservation protection by the NPS or any other federal agency, state, local government, or privately owned conservation areas,” it added.

One of those areas underrepresented in the park system, the document noted, were grasslands, home to the Swift fox.

There are a handful of park units, including Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, that capture vestiges of shortgrass and tallgrass prairie, but through the decades there have been calls for a large Great Plains National Park/NPS file

According to the plan, among the missing pieces:

• The headwaters of major rivers deserve additional consideration for protection because they support a wide array of human and ecosystem services such as clean water, healthy plant and wildlife populations, power generation, and economic benefits for downstream communities. Unfortunately, these hotspots are often influenced to a heightened degree by human pressures and, increasingly, by the effects of climate change. Freshwater biodiversity hotspots require heightened protection, yet in the United States and elsewhere globally, few freshwater sources are protected.
• … national marine sanctuaries, national wildlife refuges, and national parks cover only a small fraction of the marine environment in need of protection. A strategically designed system of marine reserves covering a broad range of representative habitats is essential to ensure long-term survival of myriad species
• A quarter of the Earth was once covered by grasslands. Today, approximately 5 percent of grasslands are protected globally. Protected grasslands are threatened by invasive species and fire suppression, as well as fragmentation and urbanization. For those grasslands not yet protected, the primary threat is conversion to farmland.
• Coastal ecosystems in need of protection are located on the Gulf of Mexico, in the Florida Keys, in Alaska, along Arctic tidal flats, and along the Pacific northwest coastline, to name a few.
• Urban encroachment and the associated wildfire suppression threaten high deserts and exacerbate the impacts of climate change. Between 1990 and 2007, more than eight million homes were built in the wildland urban interface of the western US.

Preserving such places through expansion of the park system carries several benefits, maintains Kellett.

“I really see it, in a way, as a problem-solving approach to things because we have at least two mega problems facing the planet,” he said. “We’ve got climate change, we’ve got loss of biodiversity. But really, No. 3 is the impacts of these things on humans. And so now, it just so happens that national parks address all three of those things, because protecting land and water and stores carbon, it mitigates the climate, it's a national natural infrastructure to buffer against storms, etc.”

From the standpoint of Hilty at the Y2Y Initiative, not everything needs to be managed as a protected area.

"We're not looking to kick people out, but only to conserve really important core habitats," she said of the Y2Y effort. "And then, secondly, to connect them, because we know from science that connected protected areas are more likely to retain their elements, to retain their ecological processes over time. And, of course, when you add on the layer of a changing climate, allowing animals and plants space to redistribute across the landscape to find their climate niche is really important, and that can't happen in a sea of humanity. There has to be room and corridors that allow species to move through time and space."

With the clock ticking on climate change and biodiversity being overrun by development, business as usual in conservation circles might not be the best approach.

"We talk about Yellowstone [National Park] as this iconic, world-renowned, most important place for wildlife in the world," said Leslie, "and yet we cannot protect what happens in regards to migration."

As key as migration is for some wildlife, obstacles continue to pop up. In Wyoming, the state recently auctioned off oil and gas leases on 640 acres —at just $19 per acre— along the "Path of the Pronghorn" migratory corridor that stretches from Grand Teton National Park to the Pinedale, Wyoming, area. In Georgia, a congressman is railing against federal legislation aimed at protecting endangered right whales.

"Maybe we do need some new national parks," said Hilty. "How do we get those in an ecologically representative way over time? That's a challenge that I don't think that the current government has taken on squarely,  because there is such a concern about what some folks who react to this call the land grab. I don't think that's the intent at all. The intent is let's work on this together to conserve what we all care about."