Global Change and Human Impact Challenges in Managing Iconic National Parks

Biodiversity is under increasing pressure worldwide from increasing human population, global economic and social changes, and climate change. These pressures result from the interaction between the expanding influence of humanity and ecological processes that alter the delivery of ecosystem goods and services (Dudley and Stolton 2012). Most of the world’s national parks conserve places of high biodiversity value, maintain genetic diversity, protect cultural identities, and attract visitors from around the world seeking to experience iconic species and landscapes. Concomitantly, they help safeguard against the more recently identified pressures to biodiversity. In this paper, we address some of the effects that climate change has on the human and natural components of iconic national park systems, and the effects that human interactions have on the natural component of national parks, particularly at the local level. Climate change, changes in land use, and corresponding changes in land cover have been proposed as the three greatest threats to biodiversity in the present century (Mooney et al. 2009). Climate change affects a wide spectrum of organisms, including their morphology, physiology, phenology, life history, abundance, and distribution. Land use and land cover changes have been identified as important feedback mechanisms affecting global change and corresponding shifts in social and ecological behavior of people, communities, and systems (Sommer et al. 2010). The related processes also affect the sustainability of national parks, which are compounded by socioeconomic, environmental, and political drivers to produce landscape fragmentation, over-harvesting of resources, and related pressures. Negative human impacts are two-fold: (1) local communities, reliant on natural areas for food, medicine, employment and cultural reasons, are consuming and often degrading ecosystems as the human imprint expands and intensifies within and along the edges of parks; and (2) tourism is increasingly consumptive in its demands for enhanced access to protected areas and increasing services as part of “experiencing” iconic species and landscapes. We regard iconic national parks as local examples of human–artifactual–natural systems that are influenced by external abiotic, biotic, and globalization processes (see Miller et al., this issue; Walsh et al., this issue). The challenge for management of iconic national parks is to address threats while still meeting the protection and visitor objectives inherent in the