UC research is saving the best parts of California’s national parks

America is celebrating a milestone birthday for our beloved national parks. 110 years ago this week, Congress signed a bill - written by two UC alums - creating the National Park Service.

Today the National Park Service manages 433 places across the country, including 28 parks, seashores, monuments and recreation areas in California. And UC continues to shape the national parks in surprising and important ways.

This National Park Week, hop in for a digital road trip through the Golden State's magnificent, diverse and totally awesome national parks. We're exploring how UC science gives rangers the information they need to protect our parks while welcoming all who visit in search of inspiration, connection and memories that will last a lifetime.

Keeping redwood trees growing in Redwood State and National Parks

Somewhere in Redwood State and National Parks on the far northern California coast stands the tallest tree on Earth. Nicknamed Hyperion, the tree is at least 600 years old and 380 feet tall. Hyperion is so special that its location isn't even on the map. But UC research has identified one recent phenomenon that Hyperion and other ancient redwoods - which have survived decades of logging and development, centuries of fires and pests, and a climate that's oscillated over millennia - may have a harder time escaping.

UC Berkeley ecologist Todd Dawson discovered that redwoods get about a third of the water they need from fog. Dawson found that fog has dried up too, by as much as 33% since the 1950s as California gets hotter. "We're quite concerned about what those declines in fog actually mean for the future growth of the redwoods," Dawson told KQED.

Dawson's findings have spurred the National Park Service to give redwoods their best shot at surviving California's future climate. The agency cites his research in an ambitious ongoing effort to restore 120,000 acres of previously logged forest in Redwood State and National Parks.

Bringing condors back to California skies at Pinnacles

A decades-long fight to save the California condor from extinction is centered at Pinnacles National Park. In the 1980s, the global population of condors - the continent's biggest bird, with wingspans exceeding nine feet - sank to just 22 birds in the 1980s. The culprit? Lead poisoning.

Condors eat dead animals they find on the ground. When those animals have been killed by hunters using lead shot, the lead makes its way into the condors. Since 1997, lead poisoning has caused 62% of condor deaths in central California, and 42% of those in Southern California.

It was UC Santa Cruz scientists who first proved the link between lead shot and the condors' plight. The finding animated the National Park Service's outreach to hunters, encouraging nontoxic steel ammo over lead. Policymakers used the findings to phase in lead ammo restrictions statewide. These changes led to lower levels of lead in condors' blood and fewer poisonings, helping the population eventually climb above 600.

Thanks to ongoing research from UC Santa Cruz, experts know that the condor's recovery hasn't hit cruising altitude quite yet. A recent UC Santa Cruz study found that lead poisoning rates in the state's flock are still creeping up - in part the result of an uptick in hunting as wild pigs expand into more areas of California.

Protecting America's most iconic giants at Sequoia and Kings Canyon

Looking up at the biggest trees on earth - giant sequoias, cousins to redwoods - is among the awe-inspiring experiences unique to California's national parks. Many of these trees are hundreds of years old, and some even have their own names. But did you know they are under threat?

Nearly 1 in 5 of the old-growth sequoias left on Earth were victims of wildfires in 2020 and 2021. Now, UC scientists are taking up the challenge of helping to ensure these trees are here for future generations, through a UC Davis study in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, two neighboring preserves in the central Sierra Nevada that are home to one third of the world's remaining giant sequoias.

Foresters here regularly set controlled fires in cooler seasons to clear out brush, aiming to starve future mega-fires of fuel. After the extreme fires in Sequoia and Kings Canyon in 2020 and 2021, UC Davis found that giant sequoias that had previously seen controlled fires survived at four times the rate of those in groves that hadn't burned for a century or more.

The extreme fires of 2020 and 2021 delivered a harrowing blow to the awesome trees that inspired the creation of California's first national park back in 1890. But UC science finds hope among the ashes, giving park rangers the information they need to prioritize controlled fire going forward.

Reviving rare foxes at Channel Islands National Park

One of the most remote outposts among California's national parks is Channel Islands, sometimes known as the "Galapagos of North America." The islands, 20 miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, are special because of the animals that can be found there and nowhere else. But for all their isolation, one of islands' denizens might have disappeared - if not for one dedicated UC scientist.

Lyndal Laughrin managed the UC Nature Santa Cruz Island Reserve for over 50 years. In the 1990s, he was one of the first people to realize that foxes were getting harder and harder to find. In the 2000s, he helped pinpoint the cause of the species' decline: golden eagles were flocking to the islands to hunt introduced feral pigs, picking off the four-pound foxes along the way. By the turn of this century, just 300 foxes remained across four islands in the chain.

Laughrin's findings spurred a desperate effort to save the foxes, which involved shooting every single feral pig on the islands, bringing back bald eagles to chase off the golden eagles, and breeding foxes in captivity. It worked: The foxes recovered so quickly that they became the fastest mammals to ever be delisted from the Endangered Species Act.

Sprouting the Joshua trees of tomorrow in Joshua Tree National Park

What is Joshua Tree National Park without the Joshua trees?

That's the question currently facing the park rangers at one of Southern California's most famous parks.

Much of the historic range of Joshua trees in the Mojave Desert has gotten too hot and dry, and invasive grasses have recently fueled wildfires more severe and frequent than anything they evolved to withstand. UC Riverside scientists found that Joshua Tree National Park could lose all of its Joshua trees by the end of the century.

The National Park Service hopes to make that dystopian future a lot less likely. They fence off new sprouts so animals can't nibble on them, bring in extra water, start seedlings in nurseries and restore other desert plants that provide shade for Joshua trees while they're young and vulnerable. Still, with conditions changing so fast, rangers are at something of a loss to know where to focus their limited resources.

To help give Joshua trees their best shot at survival, UC Berkeley ecologists developed software that maps the varying severity of fire damage across vast reaches of desert. Park rangers have already used the software to guide their response to two recent wildfires in Joshua Tree National Park. The UC team also launched a website that helps rangers predict how recovery plans that start today will most likely play out far into the future, as the climate and ecology of the Mojave Desert continues to change.

Reviving the Yosemite river that inspired the creation of the National Park Service

The existence of America's national parks owes, in no small part, to Yosemite Valley. Teddy Roosevelt visited in 1903, gaping up at granite cliffs that rise more than half a mile above the Merced River. Roosevelt came away so inspired that he spent the remainder of his presidency laying the groundwork for the creation of the National Park Service in 1916.

And yet the Yosemite that so inspired Roosevelt looks a lot different than the one we know today. Back then, the valley floor was a vast meadow, watered by the floods and meanders of the Merced River and nourished by periodic fires the Ahwahneechee people set to clear brush and encourage the growth of useful plants.

In the ensuing decades, the National Park Service viewed fire with suspicion. They locked the river in place by lining its banks with rocks and built bridges, roads and campgrounds to accommodate all who came to see Yosemite for themselves. Deprived of both fire and water, meadows gradually succumbed. Today evergreens grow in two-thirds of the places that were meadows in 1850.

Yosemite's managers now aim to restore the river's former glory. That's good news for the plants and animals that thrived when the river ran more freely. But how to unleash the river without endangering people, roads or historic buildings? For that, the National Park Service turned to UC.

Hydrologists from UC Santa Barbara and UC Davis led a five-year study of the most densely developed part of Yosemite Valley and recommended changes to restore the river's natural floods and meanders. Now the National Park Service is putting the UC team's findings into action. Just one example? In 2023, crews took out armoring along the river's banks and excavated buried flood channels in an abandoned campground, restoring 17 more acres of flood plain to the river's reach.

UC at home in the national parks