CONSERVING THE SCENERY: NATIONAL PARK SERVICE GEOSCIENCE CAREERS AND OPPORTUNITIES

The National Park Service manages more than 380 million acres of public land in more than 423 parks from Virgin Islands to Guam and Alaska to American Samoa. The parks encompass most every conceivable geologic setting and include locally significant geologic heritage to globally unique geologic features. To that extraordinary geodiversity, the NPS hosts 300 million visitors each year. This presentation will outline variety of geoscience careers present in the NPS from paleontology to geohydrology, to petroleum engineering, to geomorphology and hazards mitigation. The presentation will focus on the perspective from a national-level office—the Geologic Resources Division—that supports geology and geoscientists across the service and the day-to-day operation of the Geologic Resources Inventory program that systematically provides geologic map data and information to hundreds of parks. There are relatively few geologist positions in the National Park Service, accounting for approximately 30 out of more than 22,000 employees. Therefore, the NPS relies heavily on partnerships and internships to meet its varied geoscience needs. Those partnerships and internships will be highlighted in the presentation. To learn more about geology in the NPS visit https://go.nps.gov/geology and visit the Geologic Resources Division at https://go.nps.gov/grd. The Scientists In Parks program (https://go.nps.gov/sip) is the premier natural resource internship program in the NPS and facilitates scores of geoscience positions annually.