Imagine Montana's Glacier National Park without glaciers; California's Joshua Tree National Park with no Joshua trees; or the state's Sequoia National Park with no sequoias. In 50 years' time, climate change will have altered some US parks so profoundly that their very names will be anachronisms.
Jon Jarvis, who became director of the US National Park Service in 2009, has called climate change "the greatest threat to the integrity of our national parks that we have ever experienced". The sentiment represents a dramatic shift from the position held during the Bush administration, when officials refused to fully acknowledge the existence of climate change. Now, park managers in the United States and around the world are working with researchers to map how the landscapes they care for might change. And they are coming to terms with the idea that the historical remit of most parks systems — to preserve a piece of land in its 'natural' state — is untenable. "You can't fight the climate," says Ken Aho, an ecologist at Idaho State University in Pocatello, who studies non-native species at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. "Eventually you have to throw up your hands," he says.
Nowhere is attachment to historical fidelity more pronounced than at Yellowstone, the first US national park and the best example of the park as a landscape seemingly unchanged by the passage of time. Visiting it, one crosses paths with bison and wolves. It is not hard to imagine a party of explorers coming around the next bend. Much of Yellowstone's 900,000 hectares are high plateau, crossed by rivers and dotted with geothermal basins featuring pools and geysers. The park was created in 1872, to protect the geological wonders and safeguard a wild landscape emblematic of the American west. Since 1916, Yellowstone and the nation's other parks and monuments have been run by the National Park Service, which has aimed to preserve the land in its 'natural' condition — typically meaning how it looked before white people arrived. In the words of the influential Leopold Report of 1963: "A national park should represent a vignette of primitive America."
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A drive through the greater Yellowstone area reveals changes to the landscape. Most striking are the acres of trees standing dead, killed by an insect the size of a grain of rice. Mountain pine beetles, native parasites, burrow into and reproduce in the living wood of the trees. Winter temperatures of −40 °C kill the beetles, keeping their numbers down. But warm winters in the past ten years have allowed them to proliferate. More than half of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem's conifer forest has seen pine-beetle damage, and 10% of the forest has a 'high severity' infestation, in which more than 40% of trees are lost. Throughout the western United States, the Park Service has used insecticides to protect some trees, and removed a few dead ones. Mostly, however, it can only watch as an orange wave of dying trees ripples through the forest.
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http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110112/full/469150a.html
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