About the Center for State of the Parks
Since its establishment in 1916, the National Park Service (NPS) has been dedicated to conserving the parks' natural and cultural resources for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of current and future generations.
Unhealthy Parks
In its early years, NPS focused on tourism, not ecosystem management and research. But the 390 parks in the National Park System contain a significant portion of our nation's biodiversity and some of our nation's most important historic structures, archaeological sites, cultural landscapes, and archives. Numerous threats—including air, noise, and water pollution, erosion, invasive species, inadequate storage facilities, insufficient funding and staffing, and inappropriate activities such as snowmobile and jet ski use--have compromised the integrity of the parks' invaluable resources. Examples are numerous and varied:
- Jet Skis deposit a third of their fuel into the waters of Lake Powell in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and in Cape Cod National Seashore.
- At Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park, rising damp and eroding mortar are causing walls and foundations to collapse and roofs to sag, slowly destroying many of its 585 pre-Columbian cliff dwellings.
- In Glacier National Park, a historic hotel's thick foundation timbers are warped, walls have separated, balconies are closed because they are unsafe, and the ground floor corridor has been dubbed "Stagger Alley" by employees because the walls tilt at various angles.
Although many reports point to the degradation of the parks' resources, NPS has yet to carry out a nationwide comprehensive, standardized assessment of natural and cultural resource conditions. Many believe that the problems facing NPS result largely from a lack of scientific information about the resources they are entrusted to preserve.
The Role of the Center for State of the Parks
NPCA initiated the State of the Parks® program in 2000 with the goal of developing the first complete, comprehensive, and informed understanding of resource conditions in our national parks.
To determine the condition of natural and cultural resources at national parks throughout the country and identify resource threats, the State of the Parks® program developed comprehensive, peer-reviewed methodologies. These standardized methodologies provide consistent, reproducible frameworks for examining and scoring resource conditions:
In conducting a park assessment, State of the Parks researchers interview park staff, examine resource conditions on the ground with park rangers and park friends groups, consult with NPS experts, and analyze publications and documents in the park's library, from on-line sources, and from the scientific literature at large. The resulting data are processed through a set of more than 200 questions and discrete metrics, which produce numerical scores for natural and cultural resource conditions. Because scores for each park are based on the same set of metrics, this system allows us to compare the scores of one park with another and observe changes in an individual park's score through time.
Once data are analyzed and resource conditions are determined, the results are communicated to the public, decision-makers, and NPS (link to Read Our Park Reports).
As the State of the Parks® program has developed and gained more expertise and broader insights into park resource conditions, its role has expanded to also include research aimed at better understanding system-wide conditions, including such things as preeminent threats to resource integrity and the relationship between funding and resource protection. In 2005, the program became a formal center within NPCA, and is now known as the Center for State of the Parks®.
Addressing Park Threats
The Center for State of the Parks provides at least four critical means for addressing park threats:
Early Warning. Research provides a reliable early warning signal to detect and evaluate key areas where park resources are in critical condition.
Health Comparison. Comparing parks geographically or thematically (e.g., marine parks, mountain parks, battlefield parks, etc.) by using indicators common to all parks enables us to identify common strengths and weaknesses of resource protection in these special places.
Park Analysis. By assessing key park resources and by conveying results in a user-friendly but scientifically credible manner, the condition of park resources will be made readily understandable, encouraging citizens and decision-makers to take action to correct park problems.
Long-Term Care. Through periodic reassessments, NPCA can track changes and trends in park resources over time. This will alert NPCA to areas of concern and indicate what actions have been successful.
Future Goals
The Center for State of the Parks reports and database provide information critically needed to stop degradation of national parks. Periodic re-evaluation of parks, along with report and database updates, ensures that the Center for State of the Parks offers Congress and the American public an accurate picture of conditions within the National Park System.
