National parks are getting hotter and drier. What's the outlook for 2100?
WASHINGTON _ America's national parks are warming up and drying out faster than other U.S. landscapes, threatening iconic ecosystems from the Everglades in Florida to Joshua Tree in California to Denali in Alaska.
That's the conclusion of a new climate change study published Monday, the first to examine rainfall and temperatures in all 417 national parks sites. The study also forecasts the degree that parks could become hotter and more drought-stricken by century's end, depending on whether nations undertake efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or continue with business as usual.
"U.S. national parks protect some of the most irreplaceable ecosystems in the world," said the study, published in Environmental Research Letters, a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Reductions in industrial emissions could "substantially reduce the magnitude" of expected impacts, the study added, "offering hope for the future of the U.S. national parks."
It is hardly news that climate change is challenging numerous national parks. In the Everglades, rising sea levels and saltwater intrusion threaten habitat and wildlife that depend upon fresh flows of water. Catastrophic wildfires threaten Yosemite and other national parks in California. In Montana, there is online debate about whether Glacier National Park should soon rename itself, or face accusations of false advertising.
Yet Monday's study is the first to analyze how a warming climate affects the entire 85 million-acre national park system, a collection of particularly dynamic landscapes.
"A higher fraction of national parks are in extreme environments," said Patrick Gonzalez, a forest ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley who authored the study with UC Berkeley colleagues and scientists at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
_McClatchy Washington Bureau
