GEOHERITAGE HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT: INSIGHTS FROM THE NPS GEOLOGIC RESOURCES INVENTORY

A common theme amongst geoscientists who are being introduced to geoheritage for the first time is a sentiment to the effect of “Oh! I’ve been doing geoheritage work for years and I just didn’t realize it!” This is especially true for those who work on public lands and have long been weaving together geologic resource management, interpretation, and research. But, because much of this geoheritage work was done before the popular use of the term “geoheritage,” it has not been identified as such and is easily overlooked by the rapidly growing geoheritage community. This leads to retreading existing territory as people do geoheritage work that has already been done under another name, when new studies should instead be building upon the existing work.

One such example is the National Park Service (NPS) Geologic Resources Inventory (GRI), a natural resource inventory effort that provides geologic reports and GIS map products for NPS units. The GRI reports in particular draw connections between the park’s geologic resources, features, and processes and the park’s cultural, historical, educational, scientific, and other values. In short, the reports summarize the geoheritage of the parks. Recently, the GRI team has explicitly identified these connections as “geoheritage values” and used language familiar to the geoheritage community in new reports, but many older reports do not mention geoheritage by name. Going forward, we in the GRI team want to highlight the geoheritage discussed in our reports and make sure that the geoheritage community is aware of this resource. We would also like to be aware of advances in the geoheritage community that would be equally valuable resources in producing these reports.