NATIONAL PARK SERVICE AND NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION: A COLLABORATIVE EFFORT TO ADDRESS PARK RESOURCE CONCERNS THROUGH APPLICATION OF GEOSPATIAL IMAGERY

Managing our National Park Service (NPS) units and maintaining the purpose for which they were established is an ever-increasing challenge. Two top stressors impacting our parks are climate change and land development. Rising mean annual temperatures, increases in drought and storm events, and increases in sea level rise observed and projected across the United States due to a changing climate are impacting park resources. This is compounded by adjacent development, including urban encroachment, oil and gas exploration, agriculture, and mining, with far reaching impacts to fundamental resources parks were established to maintain.

To better position park managers with an understanding of why a specific resource is changing from historic conditions, the NPS has partnered with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Earth Science Division. Using NASA’s enormous catalog of geospatial imagery, the NPS can better understand park-resource responses to climate change and/or regional development. This understanding assists park managers with making informed decisions that ultimately feed into appropriate strategies. Strategies can range from resistance strategies that seek to prevent stressor impacts to high-valued resources (e.g., proposed development that would impact a shallow aquifer important to a park wetlands system) to transformation strategies that facilitate change to a specific new future (e.g., new wetland environments created as snowpack recedes due to the continued increase in mean annual temperature).

Projects the NPS is currently working on with NASA’s Earth Science Division include; assessing changes in snowpack and associated influences to seasonal runoff due to climate change at selected sky islands of southeastern Arizona, determining the potential sediment contribution of the Lake Mead River Delta to the Colorado River and Lake Mead, understanding landscape vulnerability to climate change in national parks of the western U.S., and understanding land development influences on increased salinity of the Laguna Madre Lagoon at Padre Island National Seashore. NASA student teams are assigned to each project, working with NPS staff, at no cost to the NPS.  This partnership is advancing the mission of the NPS, while engaging the next generation of conservation stewards.