Conservation biology: The end of the wild

Imagine Montana's Glacier National Park without glaciers; California's Joshua Tree National Park with no Joshua trees; or the state's Sequoia National Park with no sequoias. In 50 years' time, climate change will have altered some US parks so profoundly that their very names will be anachronisms. Jon Jarvis, who became director of the US National Park Service in 2009, has called climate change "the greatest threat to the integrity of our national parks that we have ever experienced". The sentiment represents a dramatic shift from the position held during the Bush administration, when officials refused to fully acknowledge the existence of climate change. Now, park managers in the United States and around the world are working with researchers to map how the landscapes they care for might change. And they are coming to terms with the idea that the historical remit of most parks systems — to preserve a piece of land in its 'natural' state — is untenable. "You can't fight the climate," says Ken Aho, an ecologist at Idaho State University in Pocatello, who studies non-native species at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. "Eventually you have to throw up your hands," he says...more