Recommendations:
- The Park Service should make natural-biodiversity protection a fundamental organizing principal for managing parks.
- Congress must provide the operating funds that the Park Service needs to meet its mission, directing substantial funding toward science and resource management programs that flow out of the Natural Resources Challenge.
Natural biodiversity must be a prime consideration in all park-management decisions, including the hiring of qualified scientists as well as incorporating park natural-resource concerns early in the planning process.
The National Park System should play a lead role in biodiversity protection in the face of unprecedented global changes and human population pressures.
Congress passed the National Parks Omnibus Management Act of 1998 (16 USC§5901 et seq.) reaffirming the need for the Park Service to make decisions based on good science and to undertake a program of inventory and monitoring.
Congress should recognize the progress that the Park Service has made in fulfilling the requirements of the act and increase funding and support for park-science and resource-management programs.
