One of the chief problems in protecting park biodiversity is the historical fact that the national parks were not originally created to protect ecosystems. When Yellowstone became the nation's first park in 1872, lawmakers simply drew lines on a map around some of the most spectacular mountain landscapes.
If scientists and ecologists were to redraw those lines today, they would be sure to include more than high mountains. They would incorporate fertile lowlands and winter feeding grounds for bison, elk, and other creatures.
Many park boundaries were drawn for political or administrative reasons, failing to protect winter range or critical watersheds.
Cutting-edge research in conservation biology emphasizes creation of new parks, expansion of existing parks, and creation of reserves of all kinds to protect biodiversity-rich areas and weave a network of connected, protected lands resilient for the long-term.
While the National Park System contains superlative examples of some of America's important ecosystem types, significant gaps remain. As Newmark pointed out in his Nature article more than 15 years ago, "virtually all western North American national parks were too small to maintain the mammalian faunal assemblage found at the time of park establishment."
Even current wilderness areas, most of which are on U.S. Forest Service lands, are not adequate for protecting ecosystems, because many types of ecosystem are left out. Cooperrider (1990), pointed out, "Of the major terrestrial ecosystems . . . 104 (40%) are not protected in the 36 million hectares of the National Wilderness Preservation System."
Long-term protection of biodiversity requires protection of extensive ecosystem preserve complexes in which core habitats within the National Park System, national forests, wilderness areas, national wildlife refuges, and other protected lands are connected by protected corridors of natural or nearly natural habitat. One example is a proposed system of parks and other protected lands connected by corridors from Yellowstone all the way north to the Canadian Yukon. Such a complex would allow species migration and dispersal, gene-pool enhancement, and species adaptation to fundamental changes such as suburban sprawl and—the most frightening of all biodiversity threats—global warming.
Learn more about the impacts of park boundaries on bison, and NPCA's Bison Belong program. | |
