Ten miles into Death Valley’s Johnson Canyon, the recreational hikers had thinned out, but Kelly Iknayan was still on the trail, scouting the grizzled landscape for birds.
More than 100 years ago, zoologist Joseph Grinnell, the first director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, visited this same spot as part of a massive baseline study of California’s birds and small mammals. Iknayan, a Berkeley Ph.D. candidate, is following in Grinnell’s tracks, surveying birds in Death Valley, Mojave and Joshua Tree national parks as part of a broader 10-year-old effort by UC Berkeley scientists to see how those fauna are faring in the age of climate change.
Iknayan may have been a solitary figure in a remote part of Death Valley that day, but she is hardly the lone scientist working in the United States’ 408 national parks. Hundreds don hiking boots, waders or snowshoes every year to conduct research in the parks, from the Florida Everglades to Alaska’s Denali.
Steven BeissingerThe National Park System contains some of the most intact landscapes in the world, making it a boon to scientists who study the natural environment. Take geysers, for instance: Half the world’s geysers have been destroyed, but geologists can still study them in the protected environment of Yellowstone National Park. The same holds true for many imperiled species, from Yellowstone’s bison to Big Bend’s Rio Grande silvery minnows, both the subjects of important studies.
