Too much ambition and too little financial transparency greatly hamstrung Yellowstone Forever in its fledgling years, and now the organization finds itself fighting for its life at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has been crippling for nonprofits that depend greatly on philanthropy.

During the past few months of watching the coronavirus pandemic roil the National Park System and those who love to visit it, a couple things have bubbled to the surface that the National Park Service should act on: Extend annual passes that are to run out in 2020 for two or three months, and make park reservations a norm where obviously necessary.

Mangrove trees serve as nature's hurricane barriers for places such as Everglades National Park, Biscayne National Park, Virgin Islands National Park, and Big Cypress National Preserve. Plus, they provide valuable habitat for fish and other marine life, and are pretty cool for humans who are fortunate enough to paddle through them. But they could be gone by 2050, victims of sea level rise driven by climate change.

Many of the threats facing biodiversity and protected areas will be exacerbated during, and following, the Covid-19 outbreak. The health of humans, animals and ecosystems are interconnected. An expanding agricultural frontier and human incursions into natural areas for logging, mining and other purposes has led to habitat loss and fragmentation, increased contact between human and wildlife and greater exploitation and trade of wild animal products. This enables the spread of diseases from animal populations to humans who have little or no resistance to them; Covid-19 is just the latest and most widespread of these zoonotic pandemics, following SARS, MERS and Ebola.