HUMAN INFLUENCES ON GEOLOGIC PROCESSES – SEEKING ANSWERS IN THE U.S. NATIONAL PARK SYSTEM

The United States’ National Park Service (Service) has a growing concern with anthropogenic influences and long-term affects on park resources. The Service is a land managing agency that manages a system of nationally significant parks.

The Service follows a mandate “…to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein … as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations…” The Service manages 84 million acres of land of which almost 44 million acres are designated wilderness. These lands represent a large spectrum of geologic settings of great interest to the general public. Approximately 287 million people visited the parks last year.

The geoscientists are faced with the conundrum of advising the agency on managing and protecting resources in perpetuity that are continually changing via geologic processes. The Service recognizes the importance of differentiating naturally occurring rates of change from human-induced change. This is influenced by a number of factors: 1) change in traditional land practices, 2) exponential industrial growth, 3) new technologies of unknown consequences, and 4) population and infrastructure growth.

This presentation focuses on the Service’s goal to examine the human influences on geologic processes through long-term monitoring programs. The NPS is beginning to do this by identifying and applying geoindicators, a system developed by The International Union of Geological Sciences. Examples of the 27 indicators include: coral chemistry and growth patterns, dune formation, glacial fluctuations, relative sea level, shoreline position, soil erosion, stream channel morphology, and wetlands extent. The Geoindicators Checklist enables the parks’ non-geology managers to identify geologic and hydrologic features and processes that can be used to evaluate the state of the environment, how ecosystems are changing, and how humans are affecting ecological systems in parks (http://www2.nature.nps.gov/grd/geology/monitoring/).