Trump admin strips key science data from America's national parks |
Aneth Wright was, until very recently, a data technician for the National Park Service. For more than two decades, Wright worked for the bureau’s inventory and monitoring program — a long-standing initiative that tracks the health of the country’s national parks through their plants, animals, waters and landscapes. The work felt important, she says, and she’d always taken pride in her group’s contributions, which informed the management of 16 parks across Colorado and Utah.
But last year, Wright says the atmosphere turned sour. I&M employees got swept up in widespread government layoffs, and the word coming down from leadership was that the program, which is the largest science organization within the Park Service, might not survive. Nearing retirement, Wright made the difficult decision to accept a buyout from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency in June. Getting “DOGE’d,” as she calls it, was not how she imagined capping off her career, and leaving at such a tense moment spoiled what was otherwise a lifetime achievement.
“It was a difficult choice to make, and I hold so much respect for the people who chose to stay and do the best that they can under very challenging conditions,” Wright told SFGATE. “In my heart, I want to believe that the program will continue, but so much went south in such a short time.”
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FILE: Petra Zuniga and Tim Smith, with the National Park Service, study a sectioned-off treatment area of salt marsh grass on the Herring River in Massachussetts, July 12, 2022.
Facing pressures from staffing and funding cuts by the Donald Trump administration, the I&M program of today is struggling to meet its mission of providing sound science for land managers, even as employees argue that this type of long-term, consistent data is more critical than ever. Amid a political tug-of-war over the nation’s parks, decisions are being made blindly that could impact public lands for decades to come.
“The purpose of the National Park Service is to preserve the parks for future generations, and they absolutely cannot do that without the kinds of information we gather and interpret from the landscapes,” Wright said. “Our program may not get a lot of visibility with the public, but it’s hard to overstate how important the work is for anyone who cares about the parks.”
The I&M program grew in fits and starts, but some of its earliest iterations began in the cool, coastal waters off Santa Barbara.
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In the early 1980s, Gary Davis, then a research scientist for the Park Service, began testing a version of the program at Channel Islands National Park. This string of five islands has been isolated from the mainland for at least 10,000 years, creating a biodiverse landscape full of species that can only be found there. In 1938, the land was set aside as a national monument in recognition of its specialness, and it became a national park in 1980.
In that time, Congress had begun to recognize the importance of science in guiding park management, and in 1998, it mandated the need for natural resource inventories and monitoring so that land managers could make decisions based on the best available research. Davis’ early prototype focused on kelp forests, and today, that effort stands as one of the longest continuously running ecosystem-based datasets in the world. At the same time, managers in Great Smoky, Shenandoah and Denali national parks were trying out their own ideas.
File photo of California’s Kings Canyon National Park.
Speaking with SFGATE, Davis said he quickly settled on the analogy of human health to describe the work, with the researchers acting as physicians “taking care of the health of their patient.” The inventory portion allows the team to get a full sense of what is there — the plants, animals, soil, water, climate and other features. With this baseline established, the team can then choose a few vital signs to monitor, “some special points in the system that will tell us about the future and allow us to interpret the past.”
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On the back of these early, successful pilots, Congress developed an action plan in 1999 outlining a systemwide I&M program and dedicated funding to keep the program going in the long term. As of 2017, more than 290 parks are monitored through a system of 32 networks based on geography and shared natural resource characteristics. Each national park site has........