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Scientists Say National Parks Heating Up Faster Than The Rest Of U.S.
Editor's Note: This news item was retrieved and first published through MinnPost's website.
MinnPost.com reports that a paper published in the journal Environmental Health Letters found that American national park lands are warming twice as fast as the country overall, and seeing a decline of four times the average decline of precipitation seen elsewhere. The results of these trends is likely to include potential extinction for plants and animals the parks were established to preserve as well as the loss of iconic landscape features such as the ice sheets of Glacier NP and the yuccas of Joshua Tree. The paper is the first spatial analysis of historical and projected temperature and precipitation across all 417 U.S. national parks, national monuments, historical sites and preserves.
The authors of the paper, led by Patrick Gonzalez, the National Park Service’s top climate expert and professor of environmental science at the University of California-Berkeley, attribute the effects to national park lands being disproportionately situated in areas where climate impacts tend to appear first and worst, such as the alpine reaches of mountain ranges, rain forests, southwestern deserts and latitudes of the high north. As part of the study, researchers took monthly temperature and precipitation data gathered by U.S. weather stations from 1895 to 2010 and laid it over maps of the entire U.S. plus four territories, then drew in park lands.
Findings of the study included a nearly 8° F. increase in temperature in Alaska’s Denali National Preserve, an 85% decrease in rainfall at Hawaii’s Honouliuli National Monument, unusually high rates of vegetation shifts in Yosemite, and worsening wildfire patterns in many places. Long term results are predicted to include an increase in temperatures at national parks up to 16.2° F. by 2100, with the most extreme increases in Alaska, and reduced precipitation by as much as 28 percent in the national parks of the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Read the complete text of the study here.