Revisiting Leopold:

Resource Stewardship

in the

National Parks

A Report

of the

National Park System Advisory Board

Science Committee
August 25, 2012

Director Jonathan Jarvis

National Park Service

1849 C Street NW

Washington, DC 20240

Dear Director Jarvis,

On behalf of the National Park System Advisory Board and 

its Science Committee, we present to you a report entitled 

Revisiting Leopold: Resource Stewardship in the National Parks.

The Leopold Report (officially Wildlife Management in the 

National Parks) was published in 1963. Its influence upon the 

philosophy, policies, and persons of the National Park Service 

has far exceeded that of numerous other studies, commission 

reports, advisory documents, and other attempts to guide and 

direct the NPS. Much has changed since 1963, and your charge 

to the present-day Science Committee to revisit the Leopold 

Report was an ambitious challenge. Specifically, you tasked the 

Science Committee with answering three critical questions: What 

should be the goals of resource management in the National 

Park System? What policies for resource management are 

necessary to achieve these goals? What actions are required to 

implement these policies? And while the Leopold Report focused 

on wildlife management, you charged the Science Committee 

with enlarging the scope of concern to include all natural and 

cultural resources for which the National Park Service has, as the 

current report notes, “an enduring responsibility.”

Committee members met in several national parks and in 

Washington, DC. They consulted experts and familiarized 

COVER: GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK / ALICIA BURTNER. ILLUSTRATIONS BY ROB WOOD / WOOD RONSAVILLE HARLIN, INC.
themselves with a wide range of documents, background papers, 

scientific studies, and other materials relevant to the task. The 

final report has the full endorsement of all members of the 

Science Committee and the NPS Advisory Board.

The report strives to provide general and conceptual answers 

to the questions posed to the Committee. Given the broad topic 

of park resources and the variety of situations facing National 

Park Service managers, general principles and guidance are 

emphasized rather than specific solutions to technical problems 

of resource management. The suggestions in Revisiting Leopold

are intended to advance park stewardship during a time of 

unrelenting change. Committee members feel there is both 

opportunity and urgency in their recommendations. We hope you 

find this report useful, as the National Park Service approaches 

its 2016 Centennial year.

Sincerely,

Tony Knowles

Chair, National Park System Advisory Board

Dr. Rita Colwell

Science Committee Chair

Member, National Park System Advisory Board

Revisiting Leopold:

Resource Stewardship

in the

National Parks

A Report

of the

National Park System Advisory Board

Science Committee

August 25, 2012

Funding for this project was provided by the National Park Foundation.
1

DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE / TREY SIMMONS

Prologue

It is an early summer morning in a western national park. A stream 

runs alongside a campground, cascading toward the old historic 

hotel. The campground is full and relatively quiet; the hotel is 

stirring as the staff prepares for breakfast service. Upstream, elk 

and deer graze on grasses, while a few early-rising visitors have 

stopped their cars to eagerly watch and photograph the wildlife. On 

the higher slopes, alpine flowers—columbine, Indian paintbrush, 

mountain bluebells—are in bloom, and pikas dart among them. 

Tent campers who had hiked up from the valley the day before 

are making coffee on small camp stoves. Higher above, a bighorn 

sheep stands alert on rock above the boundary of bare ground and 

the snow-covered slope. Still higher, a small glacier and its annual 

snowpack reflect the rising summer light. The scene stands as a 

portrait of a national park at a single moment in time. 

But there is another window through which this scene can be 

viewed, one fitted with the lens of science. Monitoring stations 

show that the soil is warming earlier in the season. High 

temperatures and several years of low rainfall have caused the 

now widespread non-native grasses to dry into fire fuels more 

rapidly than in previous years. Wildlife studies document an elk 

herd increasing in number and exceeding estimates of what the 

valley can sustain. Surveys show early season visitation to the 

park at an all-time high due to changes in school calendars and 

an increased population of seniors. Educational programs on 

local history (based on new research) are attended by enthusiastic 

tourists. Field botanists have documented alpine flowers blooming 

days earlier than previously recorded, a trend that began over a 

decade ago. Ecologists note the pika population moving several 

hundred feet higher in elevation in response to increased summer 

temperatures. Glacial ice is declining, exposing new moraine. The 

scene shifts from just a moment in time or “portrait” to a moving 

record of a dynamic and continuously changing system. And it is 

one we do not yet fully understand.
2

3

Introduction

The national parks of the United States stand as a singular 

achievement of the nation. From the establishment of Yellowstone 

as the first national park in 1872, the National Park System 

has grown to include 397 national parks, historical sites, urban 

recreation areas, national monuments, wild and scenic rivers, and 

national trails, with more than 279 million visits each year. The 

character and importance of this precious heritage lies at the heart 

of the American experience, and stewardship of the national parks 

is an enduring responsibility shared by all Americans.

The extraordinary natural and cultural resources of the National 

Park System are the environmental, cultural, legal, political, and 

moral basis of the commitment of the American people to their 

national parks. The distinctive qualities and features of these 

resources are the ultimate source of public engagement with the 

National Park Service (NPS), and their protection, conservation, 

and restoration are essential elements of the NPS mission. This 

is not just the technical task of resource “management.” The 

national parks require an ethic of stewardship that focuses on 

passing the parks unimpaired to future generations. As a result, 

park stewardship is a preeminent duty of the NPS.

This enduring responsibility has been examined previously. In 

1963, the Leopold Report (officially titled Wildlife Management 

in the National Parks) was submitted to then Secretary of the 

Interior Stewart Udall by an advisory board of scientists chaired 
4 5

by conservationist, author, and scientist A. Starker Leopold, son 

of ecologist Aldo Leopold. The report reviewed the management 

of wildlife in the national parks as practiced in the 1960s and 

proposed major recommendations. Since that time, the influence 

of the Leopold Report’s findings upon the philosophy, policies, 

and professionals of the National Park Service has proved lasting 

and significant.

Yet new knowledge and emerging conditions—including 

accelerating environmental change, a growing and more diverse 

population of Americans, and extraordinary advances in science—

make it urgent to re-examine and if necessary revise the general 

principles of resource management and stewardship in the 

national parks as described in the Leopold Report. The current 

committee has endeavored to meet this challenge by providing the 

following conclusions and recommendations.

New conditions, new needs

Environmental changes confronting the National Park System are 

widespread, complex, accelerating, and volatile. These include 

biodiversity loss, climate change, habitat fragmentation, land use 

change, groundwater removal, invasive species, overdevelopment, 

and air, noise, and light pollution. All of these changes impact park 

resources, from soil microbes to mountain lions and from historic 

objects to historic landscapes. Parks once isolated in a rural or 

wildland context are now surrounded by human development. 

Increasing pressures on public lands—from recreational use to 

energy development—amplify the importance of protected public 

lands and waters, creating challenges far more complex than in 

the Leopold era.

Cultural and socioeconomic changes confronting the National Park 

Service are difficult to overstate. These include an increasingly 

diversified, urbanized, and aging population, a transforming US 

economy, and constrained public funding for parks. The National 

Park System is significantly different—in scope, number of units, 

size, and complexity—than in the 1960s when the Leopold Report

was released. Additions to the system include significant cultural, 

recreational, and urban resources. The cultural values and 

interests held by the American people have greatly broadened, 

generating pressing demands for diversity in the National Park 

Service and for relevancy of the National Park System to new 

generations of citizens. 

Simultaneously, scientific understanding of natural and cultural 

resources has dramatically expanded, continues to grow at 

an accelerating pace, and is becoming more quantitative and 

technologically sophisticated. The conservation sciences have 

exponentially extended their theories, methods, and findings since 

the Leopold Report was issued (tellingly, the term “biodiversity” 
6 7

had not yet been coined when Leopold’s advisory board prepared 

its report). Systematic surveys of major organismic groups—not 

only for vertebrate wildlife but for plants, insects, fungi, and 

microbes—have expanded on both national and international 

fronts. Ecosystem management has matured into a sciencebased activity. There are new realizations of the profound risks 

human activities pose to oceans and the critical need to protect 

marine resources. Understanding of system complexity and 

interrelatedness has advanced along with recognition that this 

understanding is incomplete. The need for science—to understand 

how park ecosystems function, monitor impacts of change (even 

from afar), inform decision makers and their decisions, and 

enrich public appreciation of park values—has never been greater. 

In addition, the National Park System is an extraordinary national 

asset for advancing science and scholarship—from new discoveries 

of valuable genetic resources to monitoring benchmarks for 

environmental change and increasing knowledge of the impact of 

thousands of years of human history on the American landscape. 

For all these reasons, revisiting the Leopold Report—which 

requires reexamining the core purposes of the National Park 

System and the stewardship responsibilities of the National Park 

Service—is both necessary and compelling as the NPS approaches 

2016, the year of its centennial celebration.

The scope of this report

The 1963 Leopold Report addressed three basic questions: 

1) What should be the goals of wildlife management in the 

national parks?

2) What general policies of management are best adapted to 

achieve the pre-determined goals?

3) What are some of the methods suitable for on-the-ground 

implementation of policies?

Leopold and his advisory board confronted the question of goals 

boldly and directly, recommending that “biotic associations within 

each park be maintained or where necessary recreated as nearly 

as possible in the condition that prevailed” before the arrival of 

Europeans on the continent. In a memorable phrase, the report 

declared, “A national park should present a vignette of primitive 

America.” The authors also described implications of this goal as 

“not done easily nor can it be done completely.” The report was 

adamant:

“Yet, if the goal cannot be fully achieved it can be 

approached. A reasonable illusion of primitive 

America could be recreated, using the utmost in skill, 

judgment, and ecologic sensitivity. This in our opinion 

should be the objective of every national park and 

monument.”
8 9

The current committee has responded to the charge given to it by 

the NPS and its National Park System Advisory Board—to revisit 

the Leopold Report—by answering three contemporary and 

expanded questions framed as in the original report:

1) What should be the goals of resource management in the 

National Park System?

2) What policies for resource management are necessary to 

achieve these goals?

3) What actions are required to implement these policies?

The current committee elected neither to offer an extended 

critique of the original Leopold Report nor to restrict its 

recommendations to the central topic that drew Leopold and his 

colleagues’ attention—wildlife management. The committee has 

neither accepted all of Leopold’s conclusions nor rejected them 

out of hand, and several of the Leopold Report findings remain 

valid and significant. These include:

•	 The need for the NPS to “recognize the enormous complexity 

of ecologic communities and the diversity of management 

procedures required to preserve them.”

•	 The necessity that management “may involve active 

manipulation of the plant and animal communities, or 

protection from modification or external influences.” 

•	 The high importance of science to stewardship, such that 

the Leopold Report urged “the expansion of the research 

activity in the Service to prepare for future management and 

restoration programs.”

Several key findings serve as the foundation of the current 

committee’s recommendations. This report focuses on natural and 

cultural resource management for the units of the National Park 

System. Many if not most parks include both natural and cultural 

resources, and many park resources feature natural and cultural 

attributes—Yellowstone bison are both ecologically important 

and culturally significant. Parks exist as coupled natural-human 

systems. Natural and cultural resource management must occur 

simultaneously and, in general, interdependently. Such resource 

management when practiced holistically embodies the basis of 

sound park stewardship. Artificial division of the National Park 

System into “natural parks” and “cultural parks” is ineffective and 

a detriment to successful resource management. 

While individual parks can be considered distinct units, they 

are—regardless of size—embedded in larger regional and 

continental landscapes influenced by adjacent land and water 

uses and regional cultures. Connectivity across these broader 

land- and seascapes is essential for system resilience over time to 

support animal movements, gene flow, and response to cycles of 

natural disturbance. Migration of aerial, terrestrial, and marine 

species like the wood thrush, pronghorn, and leatherback turtle 

routinely transcend park and even national boundaries. Resource 

stewardship requires land- and seascape strategies and tactics 

at larger regional scales. The same principle applies for cultural 

phenomena: scientific testing of drinking vessels from Chaco 

Canyon indicates the Chacoans drank chocolate beverages 

made with beans imported from Mesoamerica, linking Chaco 
10 11

with civilizations to the south. Cultural history transcends park 

boundaries. Large-scale stewardship means that collaborations, 

partnerships, and networks are and will continue to be critical to 

preserve and protect resources.

In contemporary and future resource management, the functional 

qualities of biodiversity, evolutionary potential, and system 

resilience matter as much as observable features of iconic species 

and grand land- and seascapes. Iconic species (from wolves 

to whales) and grand land- and seascapes (from coral reefs to 

mountains) depend on the much more difficult to observe but 

essential characteristics and processes of healthy ecosystems, 

from decomposition by microorganisms to fixation and flow 

of nitrogen. Similarly, cultural resources extend beyond iconic 

buildings, historic sites, and landscapes to include indigenous 

values, sense of place, historical meaning, diverse forms of cultural 

knowledge, and the recent past.

Consequently, broad disciplinary and interdisciplinary scientific 

knowledge and scholarship are necessary to manage for change 

while confronting uncertainty. New and emerging scientific 

disciplines—including conservation biology, global change science, 

and genomics—along with new technological tools like highresolution remote sensing can provide significant information 

for constructing contemporary tactics for NPS stewardship. This 

knowledge is essential to a National Park Service that is scienceinformed at all organizational levels and able to respond with 

contemporary strategies for resource management and ultimately 

park stewardship.

In addition, the American people—including but not limited 

to visitors and residents of communities near parks—must be 

recruited as “co-stewards” of the national parks. The public must 

be made aware of the challenges facing the National Park System 

and urged and empowered to take action to preserve and protect 

these resources as part of their enduring responsibility as citizens.

What should be the goals of resource 

management in the National Park System?

The overarching goal of NPS resource management should be 

to steward NPS resources for continuous change that is not 

yet fully understood, in order to preserve ecological integrity 

and cultural and historical authenticity, provide visitors with 

transformative experiences, and form the core of a national 

conservation land- and seascape.

Continuous change is not merely constant or seasonal change; it 

is also the unrelenting and dynamic nature of the changes facing 

park systems expressed as extreme, volatile swings in conditions 
12 13

(such as unexpected, severe wet seasons) within long-term trends 

of change (such as decadal droughts). Variations in environmental 

conditions, including extreme events like catastrophic wildland 

fires, hurricanes, and droughts increasingly exceed historic 

experiences. Significant uncertainty exists regarding responses of 

park ecosystems and historical resources to these conditions. It 

is an essential finding of this committee that given the dynamic 

and complex nature of this change, the manager and decision 

maker must rely on science for guidance in understanding novel 

conditions, threats, and risks to parks now and in the future. 

Ecological integrity describes the quality of ecosystems that are 

largely self-sustaining and self-regulating. Such ecosystems may 

possess complete food webs, a full complement of native animal 

and plant species maintaining their populations, and naturally 

functioning ecological processes such as predation, nutrient 

cycling, disturbance and recovery, succession, and energy flow.

Cultural and historical authenticity describes the capacity of a 

historical object or setting to be an accurate representation of a 

specific cultural time and place, revealing meaning and relevance 

of the object to its “parent” culture or context, and displaying a 

genuine and realistic connection to factual historical events. 

Authenticity—of material objects or intangible heritage like 

traditional harvesting practices—is multidimensional and rarely 

absolute. Some attributes of authenticity might be intact (such 

as the materials in a historic building) while other attributes may 

have been substantially altered (such as the functional use of the 

building or its community context). 

Transformative experiences held by visitors to parks are of many 

kinds, and are based on interaction with natural and cultural 

resources. This interaction should both educate and inspire. Such 

experiences can be a weeklong, confidence-building wilderness 

adventure, a first encounter with a night sky free of artificial light, 

exploring a tidal pool with a park interpreter, or the emotional 

and patriotic response to standing on a historic battlefield or in 

an early Native American dwelling. A first, tentative nature walk 

for the city-raised child may prove as memorable as an exuberant 

hike by a seasoned park visitor. Distinctive and transformative 

experiences should be available to all Americans in all units of 

the National Park System. This requires expanding the relevance 

and benefits of parks to underrepresented minority groups and 

communities.

A coherent and sustainable national conservation land- and 

seascape recognizes that 21st-century conservation challenges 

require an expansion in the spatial, temporal, and social scales 

of resource stewardship. A comprehensive national conservation 

land- and seascape includes working lands and waters (for 

forestry, agriculture, and fishing), recreation areas, historical sites, 

wilderness areas, wild and scenic rivers, and marine protected 

areas. Connecting isolated and individual conservation sites into 

a network adds to their individual and collective resilience over 

time. The National Park System contains many of the land- and 
14 15

seascapes most capable of sustaining ecological integrity and 

cultural and historical authenticity. It can and must be both core 

and essential to a larger national vision, with the national parks 

and historic sites serving as permanent anchors of conservation in 

a continuum of uses.

The contemporary strategies proposed by this committee (with 

their focus on coupled human-natural systems and connectivity 

across the larger land- and seascapes) require NPS resource 

management to embrace a holistic vision and design. This vision 

emphasizes the role of parks as spatially fixed, largely intact areas 

embedded in a matrix of adjacent lands and waters where use 

will change dynamically over time. The NPS should assume its 

responsibility for “life cycle stewardship” (the goal of managing 

resources such that species’ full life cycles are sustainable over 

time) and collaborative resource management, whether resources 

are migratory species moving transiently within parks (such 

as spawning salmon in Olympic National Park) or co-managed 

sites important to indigenous communities and tribes (such as 

Chesapeake Bay or Devils Tower National Monument).

Confronted with continuous and dynamic change and the goal 

of preserving ecological integrity, NPS management strategies 

must be expanded to encompass a geographic scope beyond 

park boundaries to larger landscapes and to consider longer time 

horizons. Specific tactics include improving the representation 

of unique ecosystem types within the National Park System, 

prioritizing the protection of habitats that may serve as climate 

refugia, ensuring the maintenance of critical migration and 

dispersal corridors, and strengthening the resilience of park 

ecosystems. 

The National Park System should become the core element of a 

national (and with international collaboration, continental and 

oceanic) network of lands and waters proposed above. Where 

terrestrial and aquatic protected areas share borders, such as 

Point Reyes National Seashore and the Gulf of the Farallones 

Marine Sanctuary, or Olympic National Park and the Olympic 

Coast National Marine Sanctuary, unique opportunities exist 

to embrace this holistic vision across ecologically connected 

boundaries. This network should be managed for resiliency and 

connectivity, guided by scientific research, and responsible for 

life cycle stewardship, thereby fulfilling a conservation imperative 

of protecting the distinctive role and future of the National Park 

System within the broader American landscape and consciousness. 

Because ecological and cultural systems are complex, continuously 

changing and not fully understood, NPS managers and decision 

makers will need to embrace more fully the precautionary 

principle as an operating guide. Its standard is conservative in 

allowing actions and activities that may heighten impairment of 

park resources and consistent in avoiding actions and activities 

that may irreversibly impact park resources and systems. The 

precautionary principle requires that stewardship decisions 

reflect science-informed prudence and restraint. This principle 

should be integrated into NPS decision making at all levels. 
16 17

Contemporary understanding of environmental history and 

diverse American cultures has enriched our appreciation for the 

interaction between human and natural systems. The NPS should 

embrace continued traditional and sustainable use of natural and 

cultural resources by indigenous communities and tribes, within 

the broader goal of preserving ecological integrity and cultural 

authenticity.

What policies for resource management are 

necessary to achieve these goals?

The NPS should make as its central resource policy the stewardship 

of park resources to preserve ecological integrity and cultural and 

historical authenticity, provide transformative visitor experiences, 

and manage the National Park System as the core of a national 

conservation network of connected lands and waters. This policy 

should formally embrace the need to manage for change, the 

precautionary principle, and to the maximum extent possible, 

maintain or increase current restrictions on impairment of park 

resources.

The NPS and its stakeholders are uniquely positioned to propose 

specific revisions of technical policies for the organization. These 

policies should define ecological integrity and cultural and 

historical authenticity and guide park stewardship over time. 

Such policies should clearly distinguish appropriate management 

actions and activities that preserve these qualities from those that 

can degrade or eliminate ecological integrity and/or cultural and 

historical authenticity. This will require concerted examination 

by NPS professionals and stakeholders, as well as the relevant 

scientific, legal, and policy analyses.

The NPS needs a specific and explicit policy for park stewardship 

and decision making based on best available sound science, 

accurate fidelity to the law, and long-term public interest. Best 

available sound science is relevant to the issue, delivered at the 

appropriate time in the decision-making process, up-to-date 

and rigorous in method, mindful of limitations, peer-reviewed, 

and delivered in ways that allow managers to apply its findings. 

Accurate fidelity to the law means that the NPS decisionmaking process must adhere with precision to law, be mindful 

of legislative intent, and consistently and transparently follow 

public policy and regulations. Long-term public interest emerges 

from the NPS mission, the expert judgment of park professionals, 

and an evolving understanding of public wants and needs. The 

key is “long-term,” which is a necessary consequence of the NPS 

mission and reflects—at minimum—concern for multiple future 

generations in time.

While increased scientific capacity is an essential asset of a 

21st-century National Park Service, scientific research findings 
18 19

must be delivered to resource managers and decision makers 

in the form of usable knowledge. The NPS will require a broad 

technology innovation policy that encourages adoption of 

new technologies and establishes coherent strategies for data 

sharing and access that can be deployed in support of science, 

resource management, and park stewardship. Existing policies 

and procedures must be improved to encourage participation 

of external scientists, scholars, and students in scientific and 

scholarly research conducted in national parks, and expand the 

appropriate use of parks as national laboratories for science.

What actions are required to implement 

these policies?

The NPS should undertake a major, systematic, and comprehensive 

review of its policies, despite the risk and uncertainty that 

this effort may entail. The committee emphasizes that it is not 

recommending revision of the Organic Act, altering the mission 

of the NPS, or relaxation of restrictions on impairment of park 

resources. Rather, this review should explicitly focus on aligning 

policies with the goals for resource management recommended 

here, and streamlining, clarifying, and improving consistency 

and coherence to provide guidance in resource management and 

decision making.

To implement the resource management goals and policies 

described in this report, the NPS will need to significantly expand 

the role of science in the agency. The committee has several 

recommendations. The NPS must materially invest in scientific 

capacity building by hiring a new and diverse cohort of scientists, 

adequately supporting their research, and applying the results. 

The NPS should train, equip, retain, and support the career 

advancement of these research scientists and scholars. They 

should be stationed in parks to provide place-based expertise and 

knowledge, long-term institutional memory, and technical support 

for resource management. NPS scientists (and the agency) would 

greatly benefit from strengthened and supportive supervision, 

increased opportunities to interact with the scientific community, 

including professional associations, and specific responsibility and 

opportunity for publishing their work in the scientific literature. 

Both NPS managers and scientists require training and requisite 

skills in communication, critical thinking, analysis, science, 

technology, and mathematics. The NPS should integrate scientific 

achievement into its evaluation and performance reward systems, 

providing incentives for scientists and managers who contribute 

to the advancement of science and stewardship within their park 

or region. 

This expanded scientific capacity must be interdisciplinary as 

well as disciplinary, and leverage scientific partnerships with 
20 21

academic institutions, other federal agencies, and both non-profit 

and private sectors. It should include well-established sciences 

such as wildlife ecology, botany, and anthropology. It should also 

incorporate the newer and increasingly relevant sciences such 

as genomics and climate change science, and innovative areas 

of research such as ecological economics, spatial modeling, and 

related methods.

The NPS should establish a standing Science Advisory Board that 

includes representatives from a range of disciplines within the 

scientific community. The board would offer external perspectives 

on science in the parks, provide advice and guidance on science 

policy, priorities and controversies, and advocate on behalf of 

science within the agency. The board should be given specific 

responsibilities and appropriate resources in order to operate 

effectively.

Investing in science is essential, but it is only one element in 

preparing NPS stewardship for the future. The NPS must also 

expand its capacity to manage natural and cultural resources 

efficiently across large-scale landscapes, avoiding unnecessary 

bureaucracy while engaging networks, collaborations with 

academic institutions and other federal agencies (notably the U.S. 

Geological Survey), and partnerships with states, tribes, and the 

private sector. 

An expanded role for monitoring is an essential component of 

managing for change. The NPS should function as a scientific 

leader in documenting and monitoring the conditions of park 

systems, including inventories of biodiversity and cultural 

resources. Monitoring represents an important opportunity to 

engage the American public (particularly youth) in stewardship 

of park resources through outreach programs and emerging 

technologies that support citizen science. The NPS should also 

lead the way in establishing baseline environmental quality 

standards and benchmarks of ecological integrity and cultural and 

historical authenticity. It should invest in and apply analytic and 

decision-support tools systemwide. The agency should increase 

understanding of the natural and cultural resources under its 

care, improve linkages between its substantial current monitoring 

effort and research needs, and increase access to monitoring data 

by resource managers and the scientific community.

The NPS has an excellent corps of resource managers, but these 

managers must be supported with the necessary funds and 

personnel, as well as with training and professional development. 

NPS professionals, and especially park superintendents, should 

be required to possess and maintain significant scientific literacy 

that extends to an understanding of the strengths and limitations 

of scientific findings, appropriate application of scientific research 

to management and policy, and familiarity with key scientific 

concepts in both biophysical and sociocultural disciplines. 
22 23 MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK / NPS

Conclusion: Opportunity and urgency

Resource stewardship in the National Park Service owes a debt to 

Leopold’s Advisory Board for the cogent principles, philosophy, 

and recommendations provided in its 1963 report. Now, almost 

50 years later, revisiting the key questions raised by Leopold and 

his colleagues must be done in the context of a new century.

Resource stewardship within the National Park System of the 

future must be accomplished while addressing development 

pressures, pollution impacts, climate change, terrestrial and 

marine biodiversity loss, habitat fragmentation, and the loss 

of cultural resources. These challenges will only accelerate and 

intensify in the future. Future resource management based on 

historically successful practices cannot be assumed as effective 

park stewardship. Neither is crisis management a sufficient 

response. Structural changes and long-term investment are 

necessary to preserve the natural and cultural resources of the 

National Park System.

There is great urgency in the recommendations put forward in 

this report—accompanied with an exhortation to the NPS to act 

immediately, boldly, and decisively. The 2016 Centennial of the 

National Park Service offers an extraordinary opportunity for 

action and provides a critical benchmark for progress in meeting 

this enduring responsibility.
National Park System Advisory Board

Science Committee

Dr. Rita Colwell (Committee Chair)

Distinguished University Professor, 

University of Maryland College 

Park and Johns Hopkins University 

Bloomberg School of Public Health; 

Chairman and President, CosmosID, 

Inc., College Park, MD

Dr. Susan Avery 

President and Director, Woods Hole 

Oceanographic Institution, Woods 

Hole, MA

Dr. Joel Berger 

John J. Craighead Chair and 

Professor, Wildlife Biology Program, 

University of Montana, Missoula, 

MT; Senior Scientist, North American 

Program, Wildlife Conservation 

Society, Bronx, NY

Dr. Gary E. Davis 

USNPS, Ret., President and Founder, 

GEDavis and Associates, Westlake 

Village, CA

Dr. Healy Hamilton 

Senior Research Fellow, Marine 

Conservation Institute, Fairfax, CA

Dr. Thomas Lovejoy 

University Professor, Environmental Science and Policy, George 

Mason University; Biodiversity 

Chair, The Heinz Center for Science, 

Economics and the Environment, 

Washington, DC

Dr. Shirley Malcom 

Head, Directorate for Education and 

Human Resources Programs of the 

American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, DC

Dr. Ann McMullen 

Curator and Head of Collections 

Research and Documentation, 

National Museum of the American 

Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 

Washington, DC

Dr. Michael Novacek 

Senior Vice President, Provost of 

Science, Curator at the American 

Museum of Natural History, New 

York, NY

Sir Richard J. Roberts, Ph.D 

1993 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or 

Medicine, Chief Scientific Officer, New 

England Biolabs, Ipswich, MA

Dr. Richard Tapia

University Professor, Director of the 

Center for Excellence and Equity in 

Education; Director of Alliances for 

Graduate Education and the 

Professoriate, Maxfield and Oshman 

Professor in Engineering, Rice 

University, Houston, TX

Dr. Gary Machlis (Liaison to the 

Committee) Science Advisor to the 

Director, National Park Service, 

Washington, DC