The mission of the United States (US) National Park Service (NPS) is to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations” (NPS, 1916). NPS currently manages 397 parks covering about 358,200 km2, or approximately 4...

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 ...

BACKGROUND Little national evidence is available on spatial disparities in distributions of parks and green spaces in the USA. PURPOSE This study examines ecological associations of spatial access to parks and green spaces with percentages of black, Hispanic, and low-income residents across the urban-rural continuum in the conterminous USA. METHODS Census tract-level park and green space da...

Researchers at the Center for Remote Sensing and Mapping Science (CRMS) at The University of Georgia have worked with the U.S. Department of Interior National Park Service (NPS) over the past decade to create detailed vegetation databases for several National Parks and Historic Sites in the southeastern United States. The sizes of the parks under investigation vary from Everglades National Park...

Sub-Saharan Africa has been the location of intense conservation planning since the colonial era. Under the auspices of wilderness protection, colonial authorities established national parks largely for the purpose of hunting and tourism while forcibly evicting indigenous populations. Concerns about the ethical and economic impacts of protected areas have generated interest in community conserv...

National parks and bioreserves are key conservation tools used to protect species and their habitats within the confines of fixed political boundaries. This inflexibility may be their "Achilles' heel" as conservation tools in the face of emerging global-scale environmental problems such as climate change. Global climate change, brought about by rising levels of greenhouse gases, threatens to al...

Conservation policies influence both the amount of habitat loss and patterns of habitat fragmentation. This paper develops a “microlandscapes” approach that combines fragmentation measures with quasi-experimental evaluation methods in order to assess the effects of policy on habitat fragmentation. As an application, the paper estimates whether and to what extent wildlife sanctuaries and nationa...

Weeds are a major threat to biodiversity globally degrading natural areas of high conservation value. But what are our attitudes about weeds and their management including weeds in national parks? Do we know what a weed is? Do we consider weeds a problem? Do we support their management? Are we unintentionally spreading weeds in parks? To answer these questions, we surveyed visitors entering a l...

Tropical deforestation can cause fundamental regional-scale shifts in vegetation structure and diversity. This is particularly true in Africa. Although national parks are being established to protect areas from deforestation and to conserve biodiversity, these parks are not immune to disturbances outside their boundaries. We used regional-scale atmospheric simulation experiments to investigate ...