Managing the hazardscape: The evolution of science, policy, and law in response to environmental hazards in Yosemite National Park

Keywords: protected areas, hazards, natural resource management
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 64

Abstract

Park managers must address a complex portfolio of foreseen and unforeseen challenges that arise in part from a dual mandate to preserve nature and facilitate visitation. To deal with resource management challenges, managers can identify potential pathways toward a solution through the use of science, policy, and law. However, the way these three domains have been leveraged together has changed over the course of the Park Service’s history, in large part due to the prevailing societal context, values and ways of thinking about the environment. Landscape-scale environmental hazards, including wildland fire, flood events, landslides, rock falls, and tree snags are used to recount the evolution of management response, planning, and mitigation efforts in Yosemite National Park. Hazards are a particularly fitting category to study park management actions and the bureaucratic ecosystem decisions are made within because they occur at the interface of biophysical processes shaping increasingly perturbed landscapes and by definition require human presence for potential risks to life and property. Furthermore, the Park has played an outsized roll in the development and implementation of strategic management responses in the face of hazards given high levels of visitation, its dynamic physical geography, and seasonal climatic variability. Hazard events and the Park’s response are investigated through annual Superintendent Reports between 1890 and 2020 along with accompanying datasets of hazard occurrence. These hazards are then situated in the context of prevailing scientific thought, broader Park Service policy, and federal law to assess the relationship between institutional behavior and systemic resilience.