From the New York Times:

“For more than a century, the core mission of the National Park Service has been preserving the natural heritage of the United States. But now, as the planet warms, transforming ecosystems, the agency is conceding that its traditional goal of absolute conservation is no longer viable in many cases.

“Late last month the service published an 80-page document that lays out new guidance for park managers in the era of climate change. The document, along with two peer-reviewed papers, is essentially a tool kit for the new world. It aims to help park ecologists and managers confront the fact that, increasingly, they must now actively choose what to save, what to shepherd through radical environmental transformation and what will vanish forever.”

Part of the crazy back-story is that this report was semi-secretly put together during the “Trump clusterfuck-for-the-planet” administration:

“The team behind the report kept a low profile during the Trump Administration, when the Park Service was at the center of frequent political battles. In 2018, for example, managers tried to delete humanity’s role in climate change from a report on sea-level rise. The day before President Biden’s inauguration, they began publishing their papers, which were years in the making.”

Best managers ever lol.

“Decisions about what to protect are especially imminent for forests, where changes are leading some researchers to wonder if the age of North American woodlands is coming to an end.

“In the United States Southwest, for example, research suggests that, in the event of wildfires, up to 30 percent of forestland might never grow back because global warming favors shrubs or grasslands in their ranges. Joshua trees appear likely to lose all of their habitat in their namesake national park by the end of the century.”

In Acadia national park:

“The models show that of the 10 most common tree species in the park, nine of them are predicted to lose habitat over the next 80 years, either declining a lot or disappearing entirely,” Dr. Miller-Rushing said. That includes red spruce, which make up 40 percent of the trees in the park. If those disappear, much of the forest floor would suddenly open to the invasive shrubs, which would fill the open space faster than any manual effort could stop them.

“Right now, park managers are still finding new red spruce saplings around the park, which is a good sign. But things could change very quickly — much sooner than 80 years from now. “That decline could be rapid,” Dr. Miller-Rushing said. Red spruce is very sensitive to drought. “You could imagine a scenario where we get a drought combined with an insect pest or pathogen. That could knock back the spruce really quickly.”

“It’s already happened to the red pine. Almost every one of the species in the park has been wiped out over the past 6 years by a single invasive insect, the red pine scale. “That’s likely how a lot of these transitions will happen,” Dr. Miller-Rushing said. “Not slow, but fast.”

And to think that all of this is a simple consequence of humans pumping too much Co2 and methane into the air over a tiny 100-year stretch in the Earth’s 4.5 billion year-long lifetime.

Surreal.

[Cover photo: Abraham Miller-Rushing, the science coordinator at Acadia. John Tully for The New York Times]