GPS tracking at use in Yosemite National Park is invaluable for scientists studying wildlife in the park. From bears to birds to bighorn sheep, GPS is a critical tool for researchers and their work to study and protect both ubiquitous and rare species.

There are, deep within Big Cypress National Preserve, a curiously shaped orchid that has lured poachers for years. How many remain is a question Hong Liu is trying to answer.

The war against invasive vegetation is long and uncertain, but Everglades National Park is winning one important battle.

Chicken eggs are pretty good chum, but alligator and crocodile eggs, sea turtle eggs, and even bird eggs are also high on the menu for black-and-white Argentine tegus, a lizard that arrived in Florida through the pet store trade and is threatening to upend Everglades National Park's ecosystems.

While the San Andreas Fault holds a destructive history up and down California, seismic activity is not what’s erupting these days around the riparian habitats, undulating grasslands, and bluffs that rise over the Pacific beaches of Point Reyes National Seashore.

Avoiding alligators—real and imagined—on a slough slog in the Everglades.

New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park appears is a small but important memorial to energy industry workers of the past. Whaling ships sailing into and out of port at New Bedford were once as common a sight as today’s fuel tanker trucks hauling gas and diesel on interstate highways across the country.

The National Park Service is facing a water conundrum: some parks have too little, some parks have too much. While an historic drought continues to parch much of the Western United States, a new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association predicts that sea levels across the United States will rise, on average, 10-12 inches by 2050. In other words, from Maine to Florida to Texas and all the way up to Alaska, there are more than 100 national park units threatened by the slow siege of rising coastlines.

EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK _ It was an unlikely scene in a national park established to protect nature: bucket excavators, lumbering dump trucks, and bulldozers, heavy equipment more in place at sprawling construction sites, were rummaging through the muck not far from the park's Ernest F. Coe Visitor Center.

Three national parks, aided by invaluable park friends groups, forge a way forward after devastating fires.

Horace Kephart found both himself and his inspiration in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, and it was there that he became one of the fiercest proponents for saving the mountains from logging companies.

Plastics -- everything from plastic bottles and bags to food containers -- are washing ashore at national seashores, where crews work throughout the year to remove the garbage that is not just unsightly but a threat to marine and terrestrial wildlife.

Whether you visited Acadia once or many times in 2021, chances are you noted an uptick in the number of visitors in the park. Now, that uptick is quantified: Acadia National Park set a record of 4.07 million estimated visits in 2021.

In a subtropical landscape that claims nearly 100 butterfly species, Aerin Land couldn't find a single butterfly as we ambled across a stretch of pine rocklands in Everglades National Park, and that was troubling.

Billions of dollars have been spent to restore the "river of grass" from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay, but invasive species have been robbing the park of its small mammals and overwhelming some of the mesmerizing sawgrass prairie.

National Park Week is a great time to celebrate and enjoy the National Park System, but it’s also a time to assess the state of the 423 units of that system, and there’s much to be concerned about.

Overfishing of Florida's coastal waters has greatly impacted the fisheries at Biscayne, Dry Tortugas, and Everglades national parks according to a 20-year survey of catches, placing those fisheries on "the brink of calamity."

Sometimes, hidden in plain sight, is a rich chapter of American history that is preserved and interpreted by the National Park Service. Such is the case with the Freedom Trail and Black Heritage Trail in Boston.

More sunshine, warmer temperatures, longer days, and birdsong at dawn build our excitement for spring. And no one is more joyous than a gardener. Or in this case, the gardeners at the Darrington School Greenhouse in northwestern Washington state.

There are inequities when it comes to funding units of the National Park System that protect and interpret cultural and historic sites vs. those that are focused on natural resources and sweeping vistas.