The Department of the Interior’s National Park Service is responsible for managing a large and diverse array of park units that include some of the most significant natural and cultural resources in the nation. In recent years, concern has grown that the parks’ responsibilities and popularity might be hampering the parks’ ability to serve visitors and manage resources. The national park system now hosts about 270 million visitors a year—an increase of more than 20 percent since 1985. The National Park Service is the caretaker of many of the nation’s most precious natural and cultural resources. Today, more than 100 years after the first national park was created, the national park system has grown to include 368 units. These units cover over 80 million acres of land and include an increasingly diverse mix of sites. In fact, there are now 20 different categories of park units. These include (1) national parks, such as Yellowstone in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming; Yosemite in California; and Grand Canyon in Arizona; (2) national historical parks, such as Harpers Ferry in Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia; and Valley Forge in Pennsylvania; (3) national battlefields, such as Antietam in Maryland; (4) national historic sites, such as Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.; (5) national monuments, such as Fort Sumter in South Carolina and the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island in New York; (6) national preserves, such as Yukon-Charley Rivers in Alaska; and (7) national recreation areas, such as Lake Mead in Arizona and Nevada and Golden Gate in California. The Park Service’s mission has dual objectives. On one hand, the Park Service is to provide for the public’s enjoyment of the resources that have been entrusted to its care. This objective involves promoting the use of the parks by providing appropriate visitor services and the infrastructure (e.g., roads and facilities) to support them. On the other hand, the Park Service is to protect its natural and cultural resources so that they will be unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations. Balancing these objectives has long shaped the debate about how best to manage the national park system. The debate has also been shaped by a number of other developments. Despite the fiscal constraints facing all federal agencies, the number of parks continues to expand—31 parks have been added to the system in the last 10 years. In addition, the maintenance backlog at national parks has increased substantially. In 1988, we reported that the dollar amount of the backlog of deferred maintenance stood at about $1.9 billion. This backlog included items that ranged from such routine activities as trimming trees, maintaining trails, and repairing buildings to such major capital improvements as replacing water and sewer systems and reconstructing roads. While agency officials acknowledged that they do not have precise data on the backlog, they estimated that it exceeded $4 billion in 1994. As agreed with the congressional requesters (see p. 2), we focused our review on 12 park units within the national park system. We judgmentally selected four national parks, two historic parks and one historic site, two national monuments, a national battlefield, a recreation area, and a national seashore. These units represent a cross section of units within the national park system. They include both large and small parks, natural and scenic parks, culturally and historically significant parks, and parks from 7 of the 10 Park Service regions in the country. However, because they are not a random sample of all 368 park units, they may not be representative of the system as a whole. Table 1.1 lists the 12 park units that we visited. For each of the 12 parks, we collected available data on the condition and the trend of visitor services and park resources. We obtained visitor service data on facilities (e.g., visitor centers, campgrounds, trails, and roads); personal services (e.g., interpretive programs and other face-to-face programs); nonpersonal services (e.g., self-guided tours and exhibits); and visitor protection (e.g., emergency medical aid, search and rescue assistance, and law enforcement). Concerning resources, we collected condition and trend data on natural resources (e.g., native animals and plants, air and water, exotic species, and threatened or endangered species) and cultural resources (e.g., sites, structures, objects or collections, and cultural landscapes). We also interviewed officials at Park Service headquarters and regional offices as well as at each park visited. This report builds on our March 7, 1995, testimony before a joint hearing of the Subcommittee on Parks, Historic Preservation, and Recreation, Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, and the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Lands, House Committee on Resources. It also draws on the 26 reports and testimonies that we have issued over the last 5 years on a wide range of Park Service activities and related programs. (For a list of related GAO products, see the end of this report). We conducted our review from April 1994 through July 1995 in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. The natural beauty and historical settings of the national parks make visits by most people a pleasurable and often inspiring experience. Surveys by the Park Service and others show that, in general, visitors are very pleased with their experience at national parks. Nonetheless, we found cause for concern about the health of the park system in terms of both visitor services and resource management. The scope and quality of visitor services provided by the Park Service are deteriorating, and a lack of sufficient data on the condition of many natural and cultural resources in the parks raises questions about whether the agency is meeting its mission of preserving and protecting the resources under its care. Of the 12 parks included in our review, 11 had recently cut back the level of visitor services. This reduction is particularly significant considering that managers at most of the parks told us that meeting visitors’ needs gets top priority, often at the expense of other park activities. The following are examples of the cuts in service: At Padre Island National Seashore in Texas, no lifeguards were on duty along the beach during the summer of 1994 to help ensure the safety of swimmers for the first time in 20 years, according to a park official. The beach is one of the primary attractions of the park and hosted an average of 1,300 visitors during summer weekend days in 1991-92. At Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, interpretive programs to assist visitors in understanding and appreciating the natural and scenic aspects of the park were cut by over 80 percent from 1987 through 1993. According to park officials, cutbacks included not having interpreters stationed at busy overlooks and trailheads, considerably fewer guided nature walks, and considerably fewer evening campsite talks about the park’s wildlife and cultural resources. One popular campground of 186 campsites (about one-fourth of all campsites in the park) has been closed because of funding limitations since 1993 and, according to park officials, is scheduled to remain closed until at least 1998. In addition, because of limited funding, park staff have been unable to remove numerous trees that pose a hazard to visitors because they hang precariously over hiking trails. At Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico, the main museum—one of the most popular stops at the park—was closed for more than a year because of problems with repairing a leaky roof and an improperly installed security system. At the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island in New York, the extended hours of operation to meet visitor demand during the peak summer season have been reduced by 3.75 hours each day—a reduction of about 30 percent. We were further told that the length of the season for which hours are usually extended was reduced from 3 to 2 months. At Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Arizona and Nevada, park law enforcement personnel are often faced with a backlog of up to 12 calls each in responding to the needs of visitors during the summer months. According to park officials, enforcement personnel respond to such problems as motor vehicle and boating accidents, alcohol and drug incidents, and increasing gang violence. As these examples illustrate, the cutbacks in services not only adversely affect visitors’ convenience and enjoyment, but also the Park Service’s ability to meet basic visitor safety needs. Table 2.1 provides more details on the condition of visitor services at each of the parks included in our review. Park Service policy directs that parks be managed on the basis of knowledge of their natural and cultural resources and their condition. Without sufficient scientific data depicting the condition and trends of park resources, the Park Service cannot adequately perform its mission of preserving and protecting its resources. However, our review indicated that by and large, the condition and trend of many park resources are largely unknown because of the absence of sufficient information—particularly for parks featuring natural resources, such as Glacier in Montana and Yosemite in California. The effective management of park resources depends heavily upon scientifically collected data that enable park managers to detect damaging changes to the parks’ resources and guide the mitigation of those changes. This approach involves collecting baseline data about key park resources and monitoring their condition over time to detect any changes. A park official told us that without such information, damage to key resources could go undetected until it is obvious, at which point, mitigation may be impossible or extremely expensive. While park officials, as well as an official from the Department of the Interior’s National Biological Survey, emphasized the need for this kind of information, we found that information is insufficient or lacking for many of the parks’ resources. This situation is not new. Over the past 30 years, more than a dozen major reviews by independent experts as well as the Park Service have concluded that resource management must be guided by more scientific knowledge.